Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Hi, everyone, welcome, Vick can have it here. It's me James today with a terrible cold as you can probably tell, but still very important to listen today because I'm talking to Andreina, an organizer from Ktown for All Up in LA, and we're going to talk about the fires in LA and the meat fade response and what you can do to help.
So welcome to the show.
Andrena, thank you for having me.
James.
Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are really busy right now. So to begin with, like in case this has missed people, and there's a lot there's a lot of news happening right now, can you explain what's been going on in LA with respected to fires for the last two three days, So.
About three or four days ago, we got a warning that we were going to be experiencing high winds up to fifty miles per hour, which is nuts, and they were going to be coming from the desert. So this is just like a barrage of hot wind. So we were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because you know, man made structures that people are surviving with
can't survive that kind of wind. But when we hear that wind here in southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly, because any little you know, a cigarette, but an electrical spark, you know, like when when it's this dry, it's enough to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened. There are about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread massively by these giant winds everywhere, so the embers are
being picked up. Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but the wind itself has prevented, you know, the big water tankers from flying, which is led to the massive deaths s that you saw in the Palisades and other areas. You know, the entire water we being grounded for a while just meant that it was burning with no control, relying on on the ground firefighters. So what we've seen
is just mass devastation, thousands of homes lost. I think there is a death tally, thankfully very low, in about tennish. I think I've heard from this morning with confirmation. But yeah, that's all we're facing right now.
Yeah, it's pretty devastating, Like whole neighborhoods have gone right, I think I thought like two thousand structures have already been burned. And like, as you said, if people aren't in the United States or nut familiar with how fire is for like out here in the Western United States, it's a lot of air dropping fire retired in and air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to
get enough water to where it needs to be. And I believe at one point that actually ran out of water in water towers right up in Palisades.
Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which is terrifying to think of. And we were warned. I'm in the Koreatan neighborhood. We were warned about low water pressure. And I do know that some areas in Los Angeles, particularly in that region, are being worn to boil water and that their water is unsafe to drink right now.
Yeah, I've seen that too. Dare was a water boil warning for yeah, lots of places. So as a result of these fires and all the destruction they've caused, I think I saw it was it one hundred and fifty thousand odd people have been displaced now, is that?
Is that right? Is that a good number?
I saw something large like that of just the people that have been evacuated. Right north of me was the Sunset fire, and that was very concerningly close to the Korea Ten neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires because we're so in the concrete jungle, like, we're so insulated.
I think that's the closest we've come to devastation, and we were really stressed out last night just keeping an eye on the news because that's, you know, not even two miles away away from the core of the densest neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Right, yeah, I guess again, people aren't familiar like fires destroy property and kill people every year here, and the climate change has meant that they have become worse and worse.
But in the middle of a city.
You're Germany not worried about fires because the resources will be spent to defend that property, right, Like this is this is a very unique situation to see huge parts of a city burning down.
Yeah, particularly the Palisades, which is historically a significantly wealthy neighborhood. Yeah, you know, a den of celebrity in Hollywood elites, and seeing it devastated just kind of sends home the point that you know, you have wealth that insulates you from the worst of what we're facing, but that only goes so far. I saw that there was a couple of wealthy people on Twitter begging for private fired fighting forces
to come save their homes. Famously, the same ones that are talking about activation and how smart they are to do real estate, you know, maneuvering to not pay into the social system that helps in these times. Clearly we're severely underfunded and severely undermanaged when it comes to the government stepping in during these emergencies.
Yeah, and like that's something I want to address because I think in every natural disaster that I've covered, the reason it becomes a disaster, I guess is because the state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people, and in almost every case it's people who have to step.
Up and look after one another.
So we should talk about the response of the LA City and county governments, and then I'd love to talk about the mutial aid response after that.
Yeah, from what we've seen here in Kaytown, if you weren't immediately evacuated, there's nothing. All of our outreach folks that were out talking to all of our un house neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds, first of all, didn't know what was going on. They saw the sky, they assumed there was a fire nearby, but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and
that we were generally threatened as well. They didn't have any supplies, and in some areas of Los Angeles we've heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued. So the city has continued throwing away tents from the people living on the streets. And then for the house people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that they've set up. Pan Pacific Park is one of them for Hollywood. There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like.
But it seems to be you know, a hodgepodge of you know, disorganization and a lot of you know, mutual aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct people and gather the supplies. I have not heard of, you know, a very formal eyed system. There is no word on any kind of significant assistance for people who
have lost their homes at the moment. I don't know if the Red Cross is gonna set a staging zone up or anything, but I do know that the people who are setting up you know, places for people to go, food, water, even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers. You know. I'm in this chat group Mutual ADLA that spurred you know, literally just on signal the day that the fire started, that has a thousand people on it mobilizing and distributing and volunteering to move people from one
area of the city to the other. You know, I have this person who needs a place to stay, Like, who's got a list of places that are open, because when you have disasters as big, you need help quickly. Yeah, and bureaucracy just doesn't you know that that's not built for that.
Yeah, it's not.
And like we've definitely seen that there was just a failure of the state to respond like in the way that it needed to as quickly as it needed to. And it's really it's wonderful to see people picking up slack, like of course it is. It's really beautiful that people show up for each other in these times. There's something about that that I obviously, like find really affirming. That's maybe why I do this for a living. But yeah,
it's really beautiful to see. It doesn't mean that we should forget that, Like the state has capacity that it is using, as you said, to displace people who are unhoused. It could be using that capacity to bring masks to people, to bring food to people, to create shelter for people. It's not it's choosing to harasp people who live on the street.
Yeah, and this is something we see repeatedly. You know, it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but when it did rain, we had historical rains last year, in particular, we had a cold front where folks die every time, and we know folks are going to die every time it rains here in LA. We have more people that die of hypothermia and Los Angeles than New York and San Francisco. Combined every year because hypothermia actually
doesn't require it to be freezing this set end. It just requires you to be in around sixty degrees and be wet, which is very common on the streets here of LA. We've seen people get frostbite from having their skin against cold concrete, you know, over the night while it's raining, and our electeds know this. When I first started doing this work, there was a slogan that we were chanting for a day in LA and that was the number of unhoused people that died every day. And
now we're at about six or seven. We request, you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, requests the coroner's report every year of how many people died, and that number is only growing. And the government knows this. They know every time we have a heat wave that there are seventy thousand people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars. They know that during the winter, you know, people are
out there in the cold and the rain. And I talk to people who aren't into the organizing space and they asked me like, well, aren't there you know, insert service here that you think there should be, you know, right now during the fires, Like aren't there vans picking people up and taking them to shelter, and it's like that would be wonderful, when there's not. There's never any vans picking people up. Know, even when they open up
cooling shelters and warming shelters. The number one barrier we heard from people in the streets is how would I get there? And when I get there, they make me not bring my stuff in, so it's all going to get stolen. There's just all of these barriers that the city is just completely you know, purposely neglecting. They could talk to any of us on how to run a successful you know, warming or cooling shelter, they don't, you know, they have no interest in what we have to say.
In fact, our city council person hearing Kytown doesn't respond to any of our inquiries at all. She just flat out doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with concerns or questions. And that's kind of how we've been, you know, working just with the knowledge that we don't have this support of this agency, and in fact they are opposition. You know, we're the ones having to organize around them and what they're doing.
Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here, Like every time it rains, people will die.
Every time we have heat wave.
I remember they found the remains of an in house person a couple of years ago, and they thought the person had been burned like like by fire, and it turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts of heat. And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, just like give an anecdote, it was I think above one hundred degrees in town. It was so hot, and I was in the river bed like I had this big insulated backpack to give people cold water, and just
like dozens of people were in terrible distress. And yeah, there was no presence of police fire and anyone to help.
Right Like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments in these cities, and people are still unsafe and they don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies because these government agencies are the same ones that you say that throw away their shit, that destroy all the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto, you know, like a better situation in life.
Yeah, and I think there's this sense of like apathy that has built and rightfully so, from the people that live on the streets where we've you know, relayed messages that we've heard like hey, two one one says they have one hundred shelter beds tonight, call and see if you can get in, and they're like, okay, you know, like I'll give it a shot, you know, And it's very well received because we understand the amount of disappointment these people have gone through when they do the care
plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name, yea, when they throw all their stuff away when they show up and they do care Plus, they show up with a social worker first, which if I was a social worker, I'd be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is that right before they throw away everything that an non house person owns, they send in a loan social worker to write their names and maybe their numbers down and tell them that the shelters are full, but they'll get
back to them, and then they have all of their belongings droven away. I can't imagine the harm that has done for just trusting services even when they're available, you know, accessing them and then giving them your information. Have one person who rightfully so told me they have trauma about filling out forms because they've done this three hundred times, you know, they said something incredible. They've been counting about how many times they've filled the same forms out to
have it lead nowhere. And I can't imagine, you know, that kind of resilience. Now, with this devastation, there's going to be a lot of homeowners who are going to experience that firsthand. I'm seeing a lot of people that are homeless for the first time ever in their lives,
like in their late fifties. And these are people that have owned homes, that have worked careers, that have you know, lived their whole life as you're supposed to you in the United States, and then in their elder years, befall some sort of disaster or social Security doesn't pay anymore, and they are severely shocked when I tell them what the landscape of our social safety net looks like. I've had people ask me like where do I go to
sign up for free housing? And I have to tell them, you know, the wait list for vouchers is fifteen years, is long, and it's a lottery. The list is closed because it's so full. You can apply to senior housing, but that's about a ten year wait, you know, that I have to be the one to tell them that, and that's sort of shock I think is going to be hitting a lot of folks that have never tried to access services before.
Yeah, definitely, let's take a little break here for some advertisements and then we'll come back. All right, we're back. So Yeah, I think anyone who's familiar with the situation facing unhoused people in southern California will understand that there is not a safety net, and that's about to become more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people. Let's talk about the way that people are helping to take care of one another, because I think that's that's what
always happened to these situations. So let's talk about the mutual aid effort. Maybe you could like talk about some of the groups, talk about some of the things you've been doing, and then I want to get onto how people can help if they're in town, and how people can help if they are a long way away.
Yeah.
In LA, we have a very robust network of mutual aid groups that have been built by force, honestly, via this government. I think a lot of them have started up to step in just there's no denying all over La that there's this crisis because you walk outside of your house and there are people sleeping on your street.
You know, there's people digging through your garbage. So we've seen this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city, and we in times of crisis, you know, will spark up a signal group that grows from zero to thousands of people overnight that are willing to jump in and get their hands dirty to coalesce and find resources. You know, here's where we're buying masks. This star is out, don't go to this one. Go to that one who's reimbursing people for a gas et cetera, et cetera. And it's
normal people. You know, I have a full time job. My friends here in Ktown for all. Some are teachers, some are in the movie industry, you know, some are random lawyers you know that will take their time out to do this work. And I think that it's beautiful in the sense that we get people the help they need and it's never enough, which is crushing. Here in Ktown.
We give supplies to about four hundred or so on house people a week minimum, and that is hygiene supplies tense blankets, We connect them to any services that they might ask us to connect them to, driving them to the hospital, et cetera. And this has been going on for the last five years. And Ktown for All specifically started as a counter protest because there was an attempt to build a showter here in Koreatown and some homeowners
organized against it. They marched down Wiltshire and shut it down. And our founders found each other because they were the only five people holding up we Want Shelter Science and just started doing distribution themselves. And I think that's one thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's not as intimidating as it seems to start one of
these projects. It's literally you and a couple of friends who decide that you're going to do something, and you acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never be able to meet the need because what we need is a government who cares about people. But in the meanwhile, we're going to do the best we can, and the lives of the you know, now four hundred or so people that we see every week are a little better because we decide to do that.
Yeah, I think that's really important to say that, Like it can seem really overwhelming. This is an email I get almost every week, like how do I start a mutual aid group? Like if you can make a sandwich, then you and you can start a mutual aid group. Like just go and feed people who are hungry. If someone's cold, give them a blanket. Like it doesn't have to be like you don't have to read seventeen books, you know, and be like starting a five H one, C three and stuff.
You just need to do things.
And I think, especially like we're going into a new administration, we're going to see the state being more hostile to people who already marginalized. And like, the best advice I have for people is to get off the internet and
to get into the streets and just do something. It doesn't matter if you say you won't be able to do everything, not right away, maybe one day we will, but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing, and I guarantee it is also much better for you and you're met, Like I feel so much better when I'm able to help people. I wouldn't be able to do the job I do at the border if I wasn't also able to help people like it. It helps me feel like I'm not part of the problem, I guess,
or like we're doing something about it at least. What are people doing right now to help people who are impacted by the fire. What are the needs that are arising and how people meeting them?
Yeah, well, Ktown for all focuses here in the Ktown neighborhood, and what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People are sitting and it's literally raining ash in some areas and are sitting in the suot, So there's that. There's basic tent and tarp gathering meals. So many emergency services shut down during disasters, you know, makes sense, but a lot of food kitchens that people would get meals from are not open right now. So it's getting people food,
getting people water just enough to survive. In other areas, folks are gathering supplies. There's all Power Books that is a big distribution site right now. Po Mutuoid out in the Palms area is doing a lot of really great work. The South Bay got swept last night, so South Bay Mutuo Aid Club is replacing tents this morning. There's a lot of the Pet Mutuo Aid groups who are gathering pet food and finding foster homes for a lot of
the found dogs and cats. It's just I mean, I can't even list the amount of people right now that are like in their vehicles doing drop offs to you know, the sidewalk project. There's a big skid row distribution point that is building up crowdsourcing insulin things that like you don't think about that people ran out of their house that they need to live. They don't have time to go get a prescription right you know at a primary care provider like that, we need albuterol that people are
having asthma attacks. So there's these kind of burdens that mutuoid projects get around because people a don't have to fill out any forms, they don't have to wait. If we have it, you're going to be handed it. And you know, even medical providers as part of our projects have become a really big support as people on the streets are often very disabled. We have a lot of folks at diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very
horrible injuries that need constant care. All Power Bookstore has a free clinic, All Power Clinic and they offer free medical care and come with us on our roots here in Katown to offer free treatment for folks. And I think that's something that is going to only grow, as you said, as this administration occurs. Homelessness rose eighteen percent in the last year, and that's only been the case
every year since we started counting. There is no way this administration is going to institute rent control or anything that keeps people from being displaced. One mutuoid project that I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the LA Tenants Union mobilizing to care for their members, checking in on their disabled members. These kind of community based organizations where people know people, they know who to check
up on, they know who's vulnerable. Those kind of organizations are invaluable in emergencies like these.
Yeah, definitely, And like I one good thing that can come out of this is that we can build stronger communities, right and we can hopefully folks who are finding themselves depending on mutual aid for the first time can realize that, like they can participate in that. And I know there are folks already why who have lost their homes who are still out there helping other people, driving around, rescuing people and stuff.
Yeah, And I think we say this all the time. In the homelessness space, you know, you're closer to being homeless than you are to be a billionaire. And I think this is one of the most direct examples, Like these people might have been well off maybe a month or two ago, and then now they have zero. You know, they're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe five years, you know, if some of them, and hopefully,
you know, they end up recovering. But I hope they don't forget that climate change and emergency disasters are a great equalizer. And the people that show their faces, they're not the politicians, they're not the lobbyists, they're not you know, the Democratic Party. You know, TM, it's your neighbor who has a mask for you. It's me, someone random from down the block, who got a couple friends together, who
has water for you. You know, like that's who comes through, and that's who you need to care for all the time, including your un housed neighbors that are around you all the time, who live in your community and who face this emergency every day. You know, they don't know where they're going to sleep every night, they don't know where
their next meal is coming from. Every day, they get their stuff destroyed by the state, you know, regularly, if not once a week, very frequently, And I hope this is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter, you know, the basics.
Yeah, talking food, water, and shelter the things I need as well, and so to pay for them, I have to pivot to ads. Now, Okay, we're back. I think that was a really good plug for like why Muti Lady is important and hopefully there are people who are listening right or people who are finding themselves for the
first time interested in helping seeing a crisis. A lot of people like will ask me if they can come help at the border, and of course you can, but you should also help in your own community because there are people who need you there, and obviously that's very
true in LA right now. So I want to give some resources some ways people can help if people are listening in LA, what are some like I know there are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete things they can do or some places they can go if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted by the fires and they want to help other people.
What are some things they can do?
You're free to follow kitown for all on Instagram. We are constantly uploading on our stories year round. Fundraisers, resource requests, go fundmes, et cetera. We really try to stay connected with the LA Mutual Aid network, and honestly, once you follow one of us, you kind of follow all of us because we're very supportive of each other's effort. Mutual Aid LA is a good hub. They have a magazine that gets published every month that has a list of
mutual aid programs all over LA. If you can't come out on physical outreach with us, which we do on Saturdays every Saturday except the first Saturday of the month when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us, you know, connect with others. You're free to help us financially. But we also you know, funny you mentioned this, James, But if you DM us and you're like, hey, I want to talk to someone about starting a project in my region, I'm so happy to hop on a zoom
with you. Tell you how we do our distribution, tell you how we make our maps, of encampments, tell you how we you know, fund and routsource always happy to find that knowledge and people messages all the time. Can we start a Neighborhood for All chapter? And we're like, we're so honored that you would do that. Please don't ask, but you're totally welcome to. And so we have Pasadena for All that is doing great work, and Pasadena for
All is definitely always in need of support. They are in a huge disaster zone Altadena, Pasadena, like all those areas are been evacuated. Palms Mutoid. But yeah, if you want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram, Ktown for All, same Twitter, same on Blue Sky and will hopefully be your input into the La Mutoid scene. We're always so happy to support anyone else doing this work. And while we focus in the Ktown neighborhood, LA is
a giant place. And if you have any neighborhoods in Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention, you know, we'll always be the ones to uplift those.
Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's really important that we share.
Like one of my friends when we were doing border stuff, made a website where we documented all the stuff we did so that it was open source and available to people, like how we built shelters and how we could But yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Like we can all help each other get that start and not make the mistakes so we all make So that's
really cool that people can reach out to you. What about if they're a long way away and they just want to send some money, They want to help and they've got money they want to share.
Yeah, you're always welcome to venmo us kton for all. Same on venmo. We have a PayPal link, We have a website, kton for all dot org. We are five oho and C three. If you'd like to donate in our you know, in some kind of corporate fancy way, feel free to dm us. We just got that figured out. But yeah, all of our money gets spent directly on material goods. We don't have any employees, we don't have
any overhead. Our volunteers are up to their necks and baby wipes usually when we get you know, sock donations and things like that, And honestly, we prefer it that way just because you know, we we know what nonprofit requirements are like and that kind of burden that that place is on mutuoid projects and we're trying to avoid them, so every time still goes to supplies, and I know every mutoid project. Jaytown Action in Japantown as well operates
in a very similar model. I would just suggest people get plugged in to mutuoid La. They follow us on Instagram, feel free to send any money, work constantly on our stories, uploading gofundmes and venmos and stuff. I really appreciate their help you out of the country and hope that one day orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we live in a great world.
Yeah, yeah, that'd be nice.
Is there anything else, like, do you have any bottlenecks or particular shortages that you want to shout out that the audience can maybe.
Help you with.
We're always looking for staples, so those are tents and tarps constantly. Those are often the most expensive items people have to purchase. Tents go about thirty to forty dollars each one, and the government throws a lot of them away every week. So those items. Feel free to always DM me if you have some that you would like to drop off. But I will say mutual aid orgs are really good at building connections directly with vendors and we usually get like a discount and buying in bulk.
So I would really love to shake people from their fear of donating cash.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an item because you know that that's the item that's given out. But sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand of those tenths, and your dollar goes farther. So you know, tense blankets, and again, don't be afraid to do this by yourself. Like you can go to home depot and buyotent and hand it to someone. You can go to home depot and buy masks right now and hand them
to someone. You don't have to wait for a group like this to be around and to help, particularly if your neighborhood needs you.
Yeah, and it's a really good message. It's a good place to end.
Just to remind everyone, it's at Ktown for All on Instagram and k Town for All on Venmo.
Right, yep, great, thanks so.
Much, thank you so much.
Oh it could happen here. A podcast from CEES The Consumer Electronics Show twenty twenty five. I am here with my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis. We have been trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention Center all day. Garrison, today, you started earlier than I did because I was catastrophically hungover after getting very drunk with the priest last night. Yeah, we had a nice dinner and then we set out to experience a fresh
new hell. And in this case, that fresh new hell was what the AI bros Have ready for your children.
No, it's funny how we both stumbled across AI products for kids like the same day, during the exactly same time.
Uh huh. Yeah, it really is remarkable that, Like, yeah, I guess in part just because like Betty is such a focus. I think it has something to do with what you saw some of yesterday where and I had caught a little the day before where they're like, yeah, they don't really like this stuff. We're gonna have to get around it. Like obviously this is inevitable, but like people really also seem to not enjoy it very much.
No one can explain why, but I think that this may be like, Okay, well, if we get them when they're young enough, if we train these kids. We can force this on them and they'll have no choice but to like it.
And it's interesting to say that because the first thing I did today was go to a panel at the Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly, which is maybe the best title for any single panel.
Yeah, that's that's fucked up.
The description was a new generation of kids are being brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives. How does this affect their learning, entertainment and socialization? Which is a good question. Yeah, we should be asked that, more people should. There was four people on the panel, Karen Ruth Wong from Ido, Play Lab Partnerships, Nilo Lewick from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network, and
Joshua Garrett from a Ready Land. And I'll talk about all these all these different companies and people in a sec Yeah. So the panel started with Karen Ruth Wang from Ido, which is the company that first partnered with sessing me a Workshop to start making online apps. So, you know, that was interesting to me because sess me a Workshop generally puts a lot of care into, like
you know, making media for children. This is a company that works with them, so I was interested in what she was going to say, and basically she talked not about any products that her company's making, but instead research into how like AI is affecting gen Z, how gen Z wants to like interact with AI, and talked about a whole bunch of research that her company has been doing for the past few years on like what people you know, my age and you know younger, what they're
attitudes are towards this thing that has become like an increasingly encroaching part of their lives. I'm just going to play a series of clips.
Couldn't be more excited. So I was sharing this.
Morning a little bit about what we're learning.
That question is what if the tech savvy generation isn't buying anymore? We have a lot of one of the interesting opinions and assumptions in our heads that these are the one they are going to be the first users and the first viewers, and in many ways they are, but then the ones that also comes the most informed opinions not just about how badly the tech feels, how cringey some of them imp be landing, but also how it's affecting their sense of humanity.
That's fascinating yeah.
The very first thing this is literally like the minutes into the panels, is like after they do their introductions, the first thing to talk about is how gen Z is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're also kind of the most AI critical.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's cringey.
Yeah, like how it feels cringy and not just that, how it's affecting people's sense of humanity and viewing them like, you know, in some ways, as like an obstacle to get over. But also this is I'm not sure how I feel about about, like, you know, Karen and the company she's representing here, because in some ways I felt
like she's probably actually good. She just had to frame all of the things she was saying as like shocking revelations to all these tech bros, be like, yeah, actually, it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run by AI.
Yeah, don't want to communicate only with AI.
I actually liked what she was saying, it is just her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times because because of who the audience is.
Do you get see do you get the feeling that she was like a bad person trying to help like other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who was trying to like in a way that these guys would listen to tell them that what they're doing is in.
Work maybe like twenty eighty so like like a little bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this, but mostly it felt like trying to inform people about how this isn't really what people want and you know, it has a lot of actual drawbacks. Here's a clip of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're asking kids to you know, get data on how they feel about AI.
Here's a few provocative ones. We really put tangible expressions what it.
Would be like to interact with.
A potential AI tool, And so we asked questions like, Okay, you've recently had a friend breakup. What kind of intervention do you want? Do you want someone to counsel you through that process or do you want someone to kind of replace their friend for the time being, just you can you know, back yourself out from that relationship. So by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front of youth, we were able to co design to view
insights at this one always gets all audience members. We put out a provocational expression of Imagine you could have an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live your life for you. Imagine they can swipe your tender for you. They would have the any conversations or they would go through the awkward introductions you know, new person in school.
And we heard some really interesting things.
I want to go on a bad day for myself and I want to have that davcation.
There was a really interesting sign that be able to live life for yourselves at badge of want.
Being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor.
Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace them in such drudgery as the search for love and human connection. Incredible that that teens aren't interested in letting a robot go on dates for them.
No, it's super interesting and like even like the first thing she said about you know you like lost some friends. Do you want an AI to like, you know, like counsel you or like you know, like like like talk about your feelings or do you want a friend replacement? And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this even like honor question of like you know, like AI swiping your Tinder for you trying to figure out what your preferences are. No, like gen Z wants to live
life for themselves. It's like it's odd because I.
Because that's what being a person, that's to be a person.
That's right, But like it's all how that's framed as like a surprising revelation.
Wow, these kids want to live lives.
So yeah, it was it was a kind of an odd pedal to go to. She highlighted that the key areas of tension in AI for for gen Z is
twofold a creative expression and human relationships. These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about is how how will affect your ability to you know, make art be creative and what it means for like, you know, relationships as a human being, right, especially if you're being asked questions about you know, would you let an AI like meet someone that you want to date first, have have them go through like a first like fake AI
date to like to like get through like icebreaker questions or something.
The amount of people I meet who feel that way about like their digital twins or like who take pride in having like an ai trained off of their social media posts at events like these. It's shocking to me because like, do you feel good about saying that a chat bought you feel like it is you that you have trained to chatbot to be a reasonable simulacrum of yourself. Do you feel good about thinking that? Does that make you happy about yourself?
Well?
And the data that person was talking about showed no, like, yeah, people actually don't want these things, Like no, that's actually is it what anyone wants out of life? This isn't what anyone wants out of this technology, right, Like we use AI all the time, you know, like like you know, like auto complete. It has a whole bunch of like you know, pretty basic uses.
Yeah, it saves me from having dispel certain words too many times.
Yeah, but we don't want it to like go on dates for us. And the whole part of being human is having you know, a degree of bad experiences and that that helps shape us as people. And this isn't like a hurdle to get over. This is like a part of what it means to be human. And then she kind of talked about that a little bit more in this last clip that I'll play.
The next one here. I prefer to give opportunities to people over technology.
I think these are the ones, and again they've seen what it's like full overplaced. I'll definitely share a lot more, but starting off with a few key learnings gen Z's value advice and perspective from lived experience.
There's something about designing for friction.
I'm gonnay like a design for friction in our age of optimization and our age of assuming that everything should move as fast as possible to make life as smooth as possible. There's something about the challenge and that comes back to play, right, Why would we spend so much time to hit a ball several hundred yards away.
There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy.
Of overcoming challenge, the joy of bringing through your first friend break up, your boyfriend or girl friend breakup.
That makes you to a person.
And as many times as helicopter parents or as people who are designed technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best possible path.
There's some push back there, some pushback, some pushback to the idea that like you should live a life, your one precious life should be lived.
No, there's a a bunch of interesting stuff there. Gen Z has great fears about being replaced. Yeah, you know, like having like workforce replacement gen Z prefers to actually like make connections and network with other people our age and actually like share opportunities.
Yeah.
In previous panels, this was something that was also talked about how millennials were way more like selective about like sharing like employment opportunities because they were like so focused on like making sure that they make it and there's a lot more like like open collaboration and sharing sharing opportunities.
It's harder, so you guys have to be better about that.
Yeah, yeah, no talking about you know, like designing for friction. There's like there's value in something being challenging.
That was very interesting because the surprise about that because it is it is this kind of I'm sure most of these people were born to wealth and privilege and the first thing that people do with money, the primary reason to have money is to reduce friction. The fact that that's surprising to anyone that like, no, like friction's necessary otherwise you're not a person. I mean, it's like that.
It's like the Gooule we saw the other night, right, like you know, they're just not really people, you know.
One thing she kind of closed on in this section is talking about how gen Z does not trust AI to understand the nuance of their lives, especially in this age of like tech optimization. Like that misses a part of what it means to, like, you know, feel proud of yourself and the work that you've done.
Yeah.
Something she should talk about at the very end of the panel was like how they hadn't factored in like like gen Z, you know and people in general, right, will will feel proud about, you know, making a piece of art, yeah, and they don't have that same sense of pride for an AI generated image, no, whether it's like a screenplay, whether it's whatever. Someone gave an example of, like, you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff.
They edit videos, right, and there is AI tools that make editing videos like easier, But if the AI does all the work, they don't feel happy about that, Like they don't feel proud, They don't feel like they've actually achieved something. And you have to feel proud about the work that you've done, so like there's actually a sense of like ownership over like the art that we create.
Eight.
An exact quote was quote you can't eliminate life formative aspects.
Which which is like, yes, it is called life. Yeah, you don't ever have anything.
I'm happy someone at CS is saying this, the fact that it needs to be said.
At all very bleak, very sad. It's really bleak. Yeah, dating people, making friends, being social, doing whatever it is you do for a living as yourself is what life is like.
Yeah.
I think last thing that you talked about is like gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries.
Yeah.
Good, and they have to reinforce their own sense of self because we're constantly being bombarded with you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts, live streams, like everything you know, TikTok social media. So we have strongly boundaries on how tech it like integrates into our lives. And a lot of the way these tech bros want AI to like become more invasive. We are not super into no.
Like all they're offering people is like this this machine will do everything that you actually want to do with your time, and also you won't have a job, like that's what big tech is promising gen Z.
Yeah, so that's how I started my day speaking.
Of gen z. Z stands for zillions of dollars that will get if you listen to these ads and we're back.
So unfortunately, that panel wasn't just talking about how kids maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also had two other people from AI products. The first one that I'll mention is called ready Land, which I think I think partnered with Amazon ors to some degree. It at least uses like Amazon Alexa's essentially a chooser own adventure story book with like a natural physical copy that Alexa will read to you and you can talk to it so you can talk to characters and choose different pathways.
I was more skeptical out of that first, because I just don't like AI's reading books to kids. Became more like an interactive story thing, and it actually seemed kind of good at what it was doing. And then the guy behind it clarified ready Land is not using AI
to generate new content for kids. It's all like pre programmed, like human paths, you know, just with so many variables already built in based on you know, like if you're making food in one of these books, or like you know, a kid wants to go on like a weird side quest. The AI already has like stuff for how to handle that. Yeah, he knows how to say these words and knows how to stitch together these things. But it's not actually generating new content itself. It's if everything is like pre baked,
it can be assembled in many different ways. Okay, so every time you read a book to the kid, it'll be slightly different because the kid will respond to certain plot elements. The kid can like talk to talk to characters, ask questions. So like this was this was actually pretty interesting. The fact that it's simply not even generating new content makes it miles better than any of these other AI Kids products.
That it's actually just kind of using some of the tech that makes up AI exactly allow you to make something humans wrote more reactive exactly.
Yeah, So like it's it's it's it's actually like a pretty interesting piece of technology, and it's not just Alexa reading a story book. It has like a large interactive element which you know that makes the Alexa part, you know, actually useful. And then there was this other product what was this what what was this one called? It's from coming called Skyrocket Toys, Hoe the AI Teddy Bear or something like that, pokay Hoe the AI Bear, which does
generate live content with with guardrails. He did say, oh good, but the AI content both comes from the input and the output. You talked about guardrails, you know, he said. You know, chat gpt does have internal guardrails, but the reliability is suspect, which there certainly is, considering just last week there was a piece of news about chat gpt helping someone build a bomb.
Yeah, yeah, which they used in just this magical city.
Yes, so he didn't say that like guardrail reliability can be so, but there is a difference when you have certainly like like more like child's friendly features turned on. But he admitted that like moderation is part of the challenge. I don't know. He basically how this works is you have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear that talks with a not very pleasing voice.
Oh I got to hear it.
Do you want me to pull this up? Yes?
Absolutely?
Okay, yeah, But basically you put in a whole bunch of story inputs, being like I want the story set in this place, I want it featuring these types of characters. I want this archetype to be the villain, or it has like dozens or not hundreds of like eve like archetypal things that you can like click and then the teddy bear will will generate a new story. So it is generating new content, but with like pre baked characters. Okay, so then it'll sit together the story. The weirder you
make the variables, the weirder the story is going to be. Well, let me play a clip for Robert here.
It's a bright and shiny January morning, the perfect time for another story. Did you know that in Las Vegas, where our story takes place, they haven't gigantic called the high Rowler.
It's taller than the Statue of Liberty.
So the whole in the real world events in places based on the setting achieves What if I told.
You there's a mystery waiting to be unround at the consumer Electronic Shoe.
There's excitement here and these that guy like sitting there talking almost rolling his eyes at his own product while it yaps in his lap is a perfect like he clearly didn't think about how that would look because it does not make an appealing ad for the product.
No, so it doesn't sound good. So yeah, they generated a story set in cees in Las Vegas and he would occasionally interrupt the bear to like explain what it was doing. So that was the other product, not nearly as polished or like really really as thoughtful as like the AI story book. But you know, maybe if you are tired of having to, you know, talk to your kid, you can just get one of these teddy bears to yeah throw thrown front raise it.
I mean it looks I think it could probably handle all of the physical contact they need too, so you don't even need to ever touch your child. And in fact, you can just have chat GPT root that through the bear and never even see your own flesh and blood.
Like I think ideally you would have them cut out of there, you know, really surgically remove that baby, you know, a month or two early, and that way you can kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you ever spend in contact with your spawn.
One other thing I will add is that the ready Land guy the AI story book particlarly when talking about, you know, the importance of guardrails, he said that there's multiple levels to safety. Right, an AI Kid's robot that swears right, it's one thing that's it's pretty easy to avoid actually, Like that's that's pretty easy.
There's a limited number of swear words, right.
And you could just like you could just block out certain things from happening. Yeah, you can build that in.
But another aspect that's really important to safety is like the accuracy of the things it's saying, right, Like, what if it's saying something that's supposed to be you know, some like factual statement about the world that's just that just like isn't true or can actually like lead to danger, Right, what if it tells your kid to do something which is actually kind of dangerous, or what if it says like not even not even directly telling them, but you know,
it says something that if the kid then tries to do that, it's really dangerous. And like this is why their storybook program, you know, does not generate new content. So everything it says is like it's like already pre approved, Like it already is going to have you know, like verified like verified safe you know sentences versus this ai teddy Bear. Because it is generating new content, you know, it could if things go horribly wrong, you know, talk
about drinking bleach. You know. Yeah, theoretically, you know, it's just just like something you know, like things can go wrong. So it's not just about you know, avoiding bad words or talking about sex or you know those types of like like inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to like dangerous situations.
Right, Well, the good news is that I don't think these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean, I guess we'll see. But these are super expensive and like, did you get a price point for that bear?
I did not hear her price point for the bear.
I'm curious as to what they're going to be charging for it. I mean, we'll see if any of this stuff really does take off. I wouldn't consider it an optimism to hope this stuff takes off, but like, they don't seem like great products to me, so I guess we'll see. I read something very interesting that is related exactly, and it probably was he might have been talked about like that weird bear or something. I read something very interesting on the subject of like AI children's toys from
a guy who was like an AI developer. This was from a post on Twitter by Alex Volkov. I got my six year old daughter an AI toy for her birthday that arrived for Christmas instead, she unpacked it all excited. I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it. She of course knows what AI is, seeing the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with chat GBT and Santa Mode, knows that Daddy is doing AI, et cetera. So a very interesting experiment happened.
After Magical Toys reached out and fixed the issue reference below. She started playing with this dino, chatted with it, and then learned to turn it off and wanted to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up. It now has paper shoes in the top hat that we made together. But every time I asked her if she liked to chat with it, she says no. A few times it turned it back on and she did speak with it for a bit, and then she just turned
it off again, not wanting to engage. I gently asked why, and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance. It's not weird to her. In fact, at one point she was pretending that Dinah was a baby and was turned on. So I told her, let's ask it to pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said okay, So we asked it to cry. Granted, they don't have an amazing advanced voice mode like open AI, so it did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her
laugh really hard. It was basically making crying sounds like talking, and also there are still technical issues. The voice is sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny for her. I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this didn't connect with my six year old.
Because it's creepy, because it's people.
They don't like it. Nobody wants this. Yeah, ick, yeah, ick. I know this is a sample size of one kid here, and I'm sure many many things will change. I shall grow and learn to interact with more AIS and different forms. But the first toy contact was interestingly almost a complete failure.
That is interesting.
Yeah, I find that fucking fascinating.
Yeah, No one wants this, even six year olds. You're like, hey, I would prefer to a regular toy you can play with.
I would prefer all pretend it's a robot, but I don't want it to be a robot. That talks to me, Poe.
The AI bear is fifty dollars on Amazon.
Oh that's not bad. Actually, no, that's good. Okay, good, all right, Well maybe maybe we can.
Even maybe order one and see and see what we can get out of it. Yeah, all right, we're gonna go on another break and return to talk once acaind about AI products for your children. Okay, we're back.
So we went and saw something else today while you were at a different chunk of the event talking to yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the ease with which we can all do nine to elevens. Super excited for that future. By the way, I stumbled upon the booth for a company called TCL, a pretty big company, fairly large, Yeah, large com and make a lot of TVs stuff like that. They had a couple of things. They had an AI laundry machine.
So many air laundry bots.
Yeah, this one was the worst because it's like this little almost a soft rounded pyramid shape. It hangs your laundry. They say they can't do folding yet, so it just sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it.
Like it just suspends it in the air.
It suspends it in the air inside of itself. And also it can only do a kilogram of laundry. The only thing they had in there was like handkerchiefs and scarfs, So it's like probably a couple of thousand dollars, but you can AI can clean your handkerchiefs and scarfs.
As opposed to my regular washing machine.
Yeah, and they had a washing machine that it can identify and count exactly what clothes are in it, how many of them there are, and it'll tell you the soil level and YadA YadA, YadA YadA. Like I'm sure some people changing will want this shit, but it's like, yeah, only people who have a lot of money and want to spend it on a laundry machine, because I don't see that it actually reduces the amount of work you need to do at this point. But the thing they had at the booth that caught my eye was a
robot toy for kids. AI Space Me is the name of the robot. Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration because like Ferby, Yeah, poor Ferby, there's some porg in there.
It's a two part toy. The interior part is like a swaddled up almost looking little porg thing with acute face and the eyes are reasonably good, Like they did a decent job of the eyes not looking creepy, but like that blink and change color and contract and expand, and then it's got like two little flapper arms that can like wiggle, and it's seated inside almost like the Aliens and independence stay. It's seated inside like this large rolling body frame that allows it to move around on
the ground. And so it's supposed to like be your child's friend. And the first thing that was upsetting to me because they had this video ad that would play every so often and it was very creepy, and you know, I thought back to when we were doing the interview with the guy who had like the robot for old people. He was like, it's very important that it not tell them it loves them. That it like always reiterate that it's a false thing. This robot just keeps telling the kid,
I love you, like I care for you. When the lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy that actually knows and cares about your child and like, no, it's not, No, it's not don't say that. That shouldn't be legal for you. To say that for you to sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent being that loves them is like deeply abusive in my opinion, Like that is actually child abuse because it's not alive anyway. So I had to bring Garrison over because you needed to see it.
Oh and saw it, I did.
Yeah, And I'm going to play a little clip from the ad, so I want you to hear the way this thing sounds.
Everywhere learning shut and growingly amy you reminds us sound.
Oh my god.
I found that profoundly upsetting disturbing. Yeah, your kid can like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll like talk to them, It'll make up stories. It'll like look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them into like live AI videos. You can put a pin on and it will record stuff that your kid does and play it back to you at night as a video. So again absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have to spend with your child.
It's in the car.
Yeah, it takes over your car, so that like it's talking to you from the screens in your car.
Like the video like taking taking this thing every like everywhere the kid goes It's like the kid's main interaction with the world, Yeah, is with this little rolling like plastic furbie and yeah, like like talking about like like expressing like love and like how damaging this must be
for like a four year old to have. Like the first thing that it constantly expressed like love an affection for is this little rolling robot that's that you're gonna throw in the garbage in like you know, four years when you're when you're like too old for it. How like traumatizing and like deeply fucked up. That's gonna be for your for like your sense of self and like love and affection.
The mix of things that we're trying to have this do. Like the other ones were build as toys, this was built as like a friend for your child as well as like a home assistance. Yeah, it's supposed to also act as like it'll change that you can hook it into your smart home so it can change the temperature.
Like they did a little in person demo where like a woman pretending to be a mom talked with it about like planting, planned a birthday party for her kid with it, Yeah, and it like put food in her Amazon cart and like change the temperature inside because more people were coming over. One of the things they advertise is is security mode, where it like travels around your house at night and acts as a sentry watching your home like wild stuff.
No, it's it was Honestly, I've seen a few like disturbing things, you know, all of like the the new drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad, But like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing. It really like viscerally upsets me.
Yeah, and I think probably very bad for children. Everything they showed us was incredibly curated, Like I when we watched this live thing where she was having a very fluid conversation with it that was clearly scripted. Yes, and so I wonder how well this thing actually works in practice.
We never got an actual like live down, No.
Because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly recognizing like what's in their you know, little kid drawings and stuff. What it's supposed to be to make beautiful, creepily shiny AI moving version some stuff. So like I wonder how much less good it's going to be in reality than the thing that they've showed us, but it's
definitely some amount shittier than what they've displayed already. And part of why I think that is, like we went to check out the booth that this other the South Korean company just called I think sk had like a they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled, And then thinking about how like in the ads, it always like recognized the kid and its parents and a drawing accurately, Well, this one when I flipped off the camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up
a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up. Like I'm really curious for when these things hit the market and people start buying them, like what sort of fucked up stuff it'll do, and how kind of big
the seams are. I don't expect a long life for this thing, which is going to be funnier because like there was already a big eight hundred dollars like Children's Companion AI toy that failed last year and the company shut off access to them, and like so parents had to explain to their kids who had bonded with this
thing that it was dying forever. And that's especially excited to be because they They've built a robot that talks to your kid and tells it it loves them, and eventually that robot is going to be taken away from the child by the company when it no longer becomes profitable. And that's I'm excited for that, like new ground and how to fuck up kids. Anyway, that's what I got, Garrison.
What an uplifting adventures again?
Yeah? No, that's all. Yeah, it's all great. All right, everybody, Well this has been behind the bastards. No it's not, or no it's not.
What is this?
This has been? It could happen here? A podcast by somebody who is slowly going insane.
Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now we still have one more day.
I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken.
Uh. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our like on the ground coverage with our with our cees best in show. Yeah so and always going to be maybe a high note.
So see you there who.
Welcome Dick It appen here a podcast increasingly about it having happened. We have spent a long time on this show talking about what the second Trump administration is going to be for trans people and you know, go listen to those episodes. The short version is that it is going to be very very bad. We're facing care bans, we're facing federal funding bands. Things are about to get unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere.
It is the combination of almost a decades worth of fighting by the right, And I think we have a tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as something abstract right, as a sort of abstract political debate, or even if it affects us, we tend to treat the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment, as sort of these distant, famous figures. But the issue with looking at it this way is that the harassment, the hatred, the violence is happening to real people, with real names
and faces, who live lives exactly like yours. The difference between you sitting in your house right now and someone whose face is on TV is about the difference between whether a few right wing journalists cover who you are.
So today we're going to be talking to someone who has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people, who have seen basically the entire campaign against trans people evolve specifically in the far right's harassment against them, and that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out of La Welcome to the show. I wish it was under better circumstances.
Thank you, Thank you for having me mea.
I glad to be here. Yeah, and I'm excited to talk to you.
I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my god, this stuff sucks.
But yeah, oh you know, it's it's our lives. What can we do?
Yeah?
What will we do?
Wow?
Yes, that's the question for the end of the episode, is what are we going to do about all of this shit? But let's go back to sort of the beginning. Can you can you sort of talk about your first encounter with I guess at that point what was a not especially mainstream part of the religious right back in night around twenty eighteen.
Yeah, so I've been I've been making music as Precious Child for almost a decade and it was my very first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that had this track on it titled Phantom, and that was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals.
You know.
It wasn't a song per se. It was experimental and I put on a music video with it, and it was pretty It's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights. You know, if you think of movies from the eighties like hal Raiser, it's kind of like that, you know, like kind of evocrative of some type of greater supernatural horror. And the far right at that time, the far right, vintage twenty eighteen, they found it and started reporting it on mess and
tagging their friends and saying report this, report this. And this was on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube as well. And that video, like, as I said, you know, it's creepy, but it's there's nothing political in it. There's a little bit of like of blood, but there's no gore. But if they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic, that's what they said.
It's is satanic. And that was my first brush with the right.
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically the satanic angle that they're taking, because it's like it's like in this early enough phase that they're still sort
of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite like metastasized transphobia as like they're driving things, so they're kind of they're reaching back into this kind of satanic panic era, like the weird nineties and two thousand stuff that like when when I was growing up, the town that I grew up with super religious, and like you know, we had to have lists of like if you were inviting like a friend in high school to a party whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party
and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about which is it's like that kind of thing, which I don't know, it feels like almost quaint now, even even as the stuff's escalated.
But yeah, it was, as I said, it was a moral panic. And their point was that that I was a moral for making art like this, and it was this is the same thing that's happening today. I'm a moral for the art that I make.
And it's not just my art, but it's me.
It's me.
Yeah, And I think that's perhaps what has changed as well, Like before they were saying that this is a satanic evil person because they're making this art, and now they're saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.
Yeah, And I think part of the focus on art here, right, is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of I mean of the original Nazis, Right, Like one of their big things was just like cracked out on quote unquote degenerate art, and they had like these like quote unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and people whose art they didn't like it. It was, you know, like what a thing that was like a significant factor
in their rise. And I think there's this sort of mirror of it here, but I don't know, starting in a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out of this very very weird like Christian moral panic shit. That's I guess if you want to look at how this, you know, plays out, like that's kind of where it is in like twenty eighteen, Right, this is the first
bathroom in past By twenty eighteen it was Carolina. But there's you know, there's a huge backlash to it, and that's something that's I think very different than now, where like all of this city transhit is happening and everyone's just kind of going eh, So, do you want to talk about the second time he became Tarken a.
Far right Yeah, I mean realistically, like this has been pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist. And there was another there was another track on that album that was also targeted. One call it titled My Little Problem Violet Door, that has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom, has some nudity, and that was the collaboration between myself and a artist who is trans themselves, Kid out of Brazil, and that has again some body
horror in it. There's a commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and identity, but it wasn't explicitly political. Again, it was kind of a surreal body horror video. And that was Brigade reported not in twenty eighteen, but in twenty nineteen and actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated.
And that video is notable because as a result of what's going on today, YouTube took that down despite it being up for five years without a problem that you know, I'd had tens of thousands of views and now it's gone.
So that was the second time.
Yeah, and that one I think is interesting to in the sense of like that one's like a lot more, it's more overtly trans and it's also I think the more trands you are, the more the more like very obviously trans it is. And this is I guess something that's very common among trans artists is this kind of like art that's an exploration of sort of body horror it. You know, I mean, I'm not going to project onto it.
I don't know if this is ucifically are doing, but like, you know, there's a lot of it that's body horror as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria, and like it's this way of sort of thinking about the things that are happening to your body, things that have been done to your body, and the things that you're doing back to it.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
You know, I didn't really think too much about the concepts in that direction when I made it or when or and I okay didn't either at that time. However, the truth is, for much of my young life, I felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to match my personal vision of myself and my identity. And that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.
When I was young.
I didn't have access to the information and communities that are out there now that sup portraans people. Yeah, and I have had some gender confirming procedures done, but not as many as I think I would have when I was younger. I did feel existential discordance, and I don't know if that's a word, but if it's not, I'm
going to coin it because pretty sure I didn't. I didn't feel feel in concordance with my flesh, and so you know, I came to experiment what the boundaries were of of my fleshy identity in my existence in my art.
Yeah, And I think there's something about the way that your art works and the way that a lot of Curtis are where there's you know, and this isn't to say that all currotas like this, but there's definitely like an edge to it.
There's stuff going on.
There's body horror things happening, There's like eighties aesthetic stuff, and I think it conflicts with this kind of weird concaid everything is like happy and cozy, sort of kitch aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of
fascism is really into. They use the kind of a kind of aesthetic sensibility as as a weapon to go after stuff that they opposed for more oftly political reasons they can do this kind of like hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera, et cetera kind of attack on queer art as a result of this kind of like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this this, you know, this sort of like cultural norm in our society.
And I think I have I haven't one worked out the political inplication of this, but I think there's this kind of connection between their their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind.
Of like horror that they kind of like use as the political attack.
Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying period.
Yeah, not just for queer people, but also for CIS people, Like I'm gonna defend CIS people here for a second.
So SIS people struggle with gender dysphoria.
I think maybe I would say every bit as much as trans people, but they sure fucking struggle with that.
Yeah.
For instance, an example I will give is facial hair. Lots of people that were assigned male at birth, they fret and earn worry over their facial hair.
Is it too much? Is it too little?
Then people that are signed female at birth, you know, if they have facial hair, you know, they thread over it. You know, well, people see it. Do I have to bleach it? Do I have to pluck it? People fret over like they're freaking jaw lines. Like, you know, if you search online like masculine jawline, how do I get?
There's a huge community out there of assigned male at birth SYS men that are trying to get more defined jaw lines because they feel that their genetics are presenting them as a non optimal male quote unquote, and of course, same thing for quote unquote females, like do I have the female feminine bodies?
Is it curvy enough in the right way? Is my waist slim enough? You know? Is am I just brick shaped?
And then all the industries around that, and that I think is horrifying, and everyone goes through the struggles with it, and very few people are lucky enough to embody the ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves.
And to me, that is a tragedy.
Yeah, And I think that sort of like fear and that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to like perform a gender in a certain way. Well, okay, I'm not going to say perform because the Butler scholars are going to get extremely.
Mad at me.
But the.
Way in which are forced to sort of live up to these standards that are sort of nonsense. I think it gets to this thing where you know, you could either sort of like muddle through it and try to ignore the distance as much as you can. You can attempt to fight it, or you can get extremely bad at everyone else is trying to do something about it, and I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option. Yeah, Unfortunately we need to go to ads, which is another
thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards. But you know who knows people are wizards. Sty'll find a way brought to you by Mabeline.
And we are back.
I mean, I guess the way should stay. Highway patrol does for skinder dorms on people.
Oh, they sure do MAKEI another example of hideous gender and arms.
Yeah.
So you listener, you're hearing me right, and you're hearing my voice. And this is another thing that all people fret about. It's not trust trans people. Lots of a fabs. I know, I'm just gonna say a fab and amap Okay, lots of a fabs, I know. You know, they have pretty darned deep voices naturally, and they I've talked with them privately and they say that they worry about how husky their voice is when they just relax. And then same thing for amaps, they talk about worrying if their
voice is squeaky and thinner. I'm talk like a freaking wrestler from w WE, you know, like people people like that.
People struggle with that too.
Just so yeah, just something as simple as our appearance and our voice, you know, we're just torturing ourselves. And ultimately, I gotta say Nia, you know, I'm I'm a trans woman. However, ultimately I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks.
Yeah, it's it's not it's not great. It's not a good time for any way.
It fauld Yeah, speaking of bad times, this isn't even an activate. I just do this now, which really bad. I do it to people my daily life. They're like, why are you anpivoting me? And I'm like, oh God, but yeah, I guess God. This and the sort of racialization aspect, and I don't know this is the aspect
of zones of gender performance. God damn, I keep saying performance that I literally mean that you were performing it, as in you were acting and not the butler thing of your perform to get to make it real.
Please don't yell at me.
Of the comments I had.
I had the guy who wrote a writer on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter.
What times.
It's really okay.
Sorry, I about to rail this enough, partially because this next part is really depressing. But so a while back on this show, my my co host Garrison, who is I don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at the Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far right panic that became don as the we spat contraversia. Do you want to talk about how the right stuck you into that shit, because Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
So you know, in twenty eighteen, as I said, I put out this album, and then I put out another, and I start I was touring the country and Canada and stuff and doing shows pretty much constantly, and then twenty happened and I became involved in the George Floyd uprising and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting, and so I began to live stream those protests and marches with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was going on on the streets to people watching, because a
lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did not understand what the issues were. And the thing is, in LA there were a lot of continual police murders even through the riots. And by police murders, I mean the cops shooting on armed black people in the back as they were running away, or executions are shooting them
in the car, that type of thing. And so I was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is why people are in the streets, this is a specific issue, these are the laws surrounding it, and why these actions by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal. And so I was doing that and I became pretty darn visible and popular, like I was maybe one of the top five best known activist or racial justice voices.
And I was targeted by a right wing activist who was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium specifically because I was visible, because I was trans, and so she went for me and posted and said that I was a transgender individual who was in the women's spa of we Spa and I was sexually harassing people, and that went viral on social media. It was covered on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant
death threats, and you know, I was docksed. It was pretty terrible, especially because I was not that person in the spa and I was only best picked up because I was picked up for my visibility. My response to that was no, I didn't immediately say yeah, it wasn't mean it wasn't me, leave me alone, Leave me alone. I didn't do that because I knew that if I said that, then they would just pick and attack some
other trans person. Yeah, and you know, I know that like the ship that the that the right wing machine and acts, if it happens to one of us, it can happen to all that's end, it likely will.
Yeah, And I mean, I think the thing that it reminds me the most something we've also covered on the This is one of the problems with talking about this. It's like doing this for so long that like there's very few things that I can say that I can't be Like I've said this on the show before. But we spent a lot of time, typically Garrison, I spend a lot of time covering the way that every time there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks
a random transperson and goes, it was this person. Yeah, and this reminds me a lot of the same thing, although this isn't more targeted, Like we've invented a fake controversy about a trans person and then we're going to like also just pick a random famous rand well not your favous, but like a random trans person that we know about and don't like.
It's my understanding that this twenty twenty one we saw a controversy that I was targeted for became something of a right wing playbook.
Yep.
It was after that that they started saying, oh, this and that person's trans, and before that they didn't have a real moral panic around trans people unless you look all the way back to the North Carolina South Carolina bathroom man.
Yeah, I mean I think I think there's an interesting intermediary thing too. Where so my friend Vicky ashterwhile who depending on when this episode comes out, you'll be hearing from either right before this episode or right after. I had another version of this where she wrote a book called In Defensive Looting. It came out in twenty twenty and just for like three months became all the rest
of it. Really two months, like became the like the giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising was just like taking it out on, so like like sitting in Congress, people were like denouncing this book that you wrote. Every base re media outlet like specifically had their editorial people going like, this book is evil.
Vicky's evil.
And I think that was also like this moment of deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti trans uprisings, because the people who you know are trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves, even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level, understand that they're that these things are preserving the same systems of violence, and so they picked us as sort of like the wedge point to to break this thing apart.
And I think with Vicky they hadn't really figured out how to do it. And I think it was like specifically your case, the the we spaw like with you being put in as the figure of the we spause. This is where they like actually really figured out how to do the whole thing, And yeah, there's just something really bleak up with how effective it was and the fact that it's like these are just people I don't know, like this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of
like astrak figures. It's just like, yeah, people I'm having conversations with are how they.
Did this Just I don't know.
I wish I had more and ELS's but yeah, I think the trends people like to to greater America, to most, to a lot of America, I'll say, are are sensational.
You know, people people imagine.
Chicks with dicks and dudes with dudes without dicks, and so I think that's really exciting for a lot of people, for.
Better or for worse. I think for for worse.
But yeah, I think that's just like people and their bodies, right, Like, you know, I guess some people walk around think all the time about other people's crotches.
I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. Crush the first of your scene.
Okay, you know, But on the other hand, right, there's this there's this aspect of which like you know, there's a serisacialism, but then there's also the experience of being a trans person is like I too am trying to find a way to not pay rent, Like that's like, I don't know.
Yeah, so back to back to Wei SPA. Yeah, that was a pretty terrible experience for me, and I'm not going to lie about it.
You know.
I I'm glad that I stood up for for myself. I'm glad I stood up for trans people that I didn't pass the buck. It was also really difficult and traumatic, and I didn't appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate being docs and you know, people have come after me my my whole life, like I present, I think just naturally physically, like I present as being gender queer, like I've been pretty like fearing like looking fem my entire life. That had nothing to do with my internal identity. I've
been weird my entire life. I've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested in things that were provocative, and so I've been harassed my whole life. However, UNTI was SPA and to experience strangers by the hundreds saying that they're gonna hunt me down, and fucking shoot me. Yeah, I never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey buddy.
I know you.
Yeah, And it's one of these things where like the more of a target on you, the more likely it is to happen. And even people who don't have targets on them, like I know people you know who've never experienced anything like this that have still just like had attacks on them, And it's fucking terrifying.
It is an absolutely terrible.
Way to have to live in, a terrible sort of thing to have to experience, especially is it's just intensifying.
So yeah, that was That was twenty twenty one, and that changed me.
That experience of being targeted and just picked on out of the freaking blue that changed me as an artist. And at the same time it also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity. And I want to speak to that because there's different tiers of celebrity, you know. At that yes, at the top, there's the tier that's known as I get a Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year, and that's an actual thing, and that's the A List. And you know you're on the A List
because Tom cruise since your Christmas card. And at the bottom is me who's been in mass media many times now but has none of the benefits.
Yeah.
You know, I make very little money as an artist, and I don't have an entourage. I can tour and I play play some shows, and you know, some of them are sold out. I'm playing a show in LA that's sold out, but I'm not playing large venues. No, I maybe play like you know, three hundred, five hundred capacity tops, and most of the places I play like small colabs that one hundred and fifty or so. Yeah, And so I don't I don't have the protection that
most celebrities inherently have. I don't have book deals. I don't have movie deals. I don't even have an asia. I don't even have a record label.
Yeah.
So I'm the freaking D tier. I'm the D tier, and they're coming after me.
Yeah.
And it's I mean, and that's the thing about the sort of like this status of like niche D tier internet micro celebrity is like I don't like I feel like I got the best possible version of it, where like I got a job that pays slightly. I think I might have hit no I'm still I'm still below the median salary of assists man in the.
US, but I'm approaching it.
We're getting closer every year, every union fight, we approach
median cis man salary. But like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right, Like this is about the best you could possibly hope for if you're a transperson and you get famous, Like yeah, I mean, like I get that threats too, right, Like nothing anywhere near the scale that you get, And mostly what happens is like I mean, like single digit numbers of trans people in the US have the kind of
protection that actual celebrity gives you and everyone else. Celebrity is just another It's just a giant target painted on you. And yes, you have none of the benefits and all of the sort of Hey, here is one hundred and fifty million people who absolutely hate you and who've been primed and targeted like specifically at you.
Yeah, It's something that I wonder about, Like why why would they do something like this? Why would Fox News we talk about me? Why would the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin mccinnis that old video about me bad Boys is a terrorist group if you don't now listener to ever recognize as a terrorist group by Canada, not here, because like we're just cool with that.
Should hear? They're white supremacist terrorist group? So why me? Why why would a congress person come after me?
And my own hypothesis is that they punched down because they secretly believe that they themselves are weak and attacking me, attacking people like me, is a fight that they can win. And my view is that it's not a fight that they can win because they've already lost. They're trying to get power in small, small ways and false ways, in
my opinion, and they're trying to get money. First of all, they want money, you know, they want their views, they want their donations, and that's the entire top of the pyramid for them and for me though, I'm a fucking artist, and power is something that I've always been developing because I've sought to know myself. I've sought to understand who I am and why that extends to myself as a queer person. To come to understand myself who I am as a queer person, that's not something they'll ever have.
So I've read a fucking won. And same with all the other queer people that are under attack, all you other DCER queer celebrities out there, we fucking won.
Hopefully well.
And I think part of this is also like the reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how far in the tide had already come, and now they're trying to like dam off the tide. And you know, like, probably it's not going to work. But the only way that it can is if everyone just like sits here does nothing and let's to just keep building and building and building more walls. It's something that is within our
power to resist. We just have to actually do it, right. You have to actually organize, You have to talk to the people around you, you have to go get them to do things to resist this. And if we do, yeah, well, like with the things that we've already won, the things that we are going to win are going to stick. But if not, like things are going to get really really bad really quickly. And yeah, and speaking of things getting very bad very quickly, I carre some more ats
before we get back to these getting wars. We are back, Yeah, You've been specifically targeted by a sitting US Congresswoman, Nancy Mace, who is the person who actually I don't know if we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans people to not be able to use the bathroom on Capitol Hill. She's become a leading anti trans figure in Congress.
Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about trans women and how they should be put in men's jails, which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get horribly braved and killed, which is one of the predominant things that happens when we get put in ben's prisons. And she specifically came after years, you want to talk about how that happened and the latest sort of a congress woman tweets and a fucking social media company does their bidding.
Yeah, so right at the end of twenty twenty four, I think it was on December twenty eighth, I was doxed by a right wing control nazi that has docked multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends, and they pointed out in a tweet how my art was on YouTube, specifically, my music videos were on YouTube calling for violence and how I was in evil trans person and they added like at symbol YouTube and said that these videos are in violation of your terms of service?
Why are they still up?
And Nancy May saw that because if you look at her Twitter, it's all just the stocks and trans people and perpetual like rage bait about the queer menace, the trans menace, and so she saw that retweeted and said, YouTube, this squarly violates your terms of service. Why haven't you done anything? And then immediately following that, my videos were taken down, the ones that were mentioned in these tweets.
And as I said before, some one of these videos, what was that of my little problem that's been up for seven years?
Yeah, for a long time.
Yeah.
And YouTube terms of service they're very clear, and I do my best to stay within YouTube terms of service so my work doesn't get taken down.
And they state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity that is.
Allowed within the context of art, within the context of music videos, and so my videos, you know, they weren't designed to this is from the terms of service. They weren't designed to sexually titillate or gratify. That's exactly what it says in the in the terms. Now they weren't recreations of real life violence, and they weren't real life violence, but they were still they were still removed at the behest at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.
Yeah, And I think there's there's a couple of things going on here, one of which is, you know, so we've seen this with Facebook and the last I guess when this comes out will be like a week ago. But you know, Facebook has in stated policies that allow you to basically stay slurs against queer people, allowed you to call core people the illnesses and stuff like that that's very specifically you could only do to queer people.
You can't do it to anyone else. And I think there's this sort of trend here of I don't know with Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with the sort of new Trump regime, because like this is just your Facebook is right, like they did the Row Higg the genocide, like the genocide into Gray too, that was also a Facebook thing. So they've always just been evil and they have been sort of looking for the excuse that they needed to like drop the hammer on us.
But I think YouTube, to some extent to what we're seeing right now is this kind of like mask coming off moment where people are realizing that with Trump and power, they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because specifically like on a trans artist, because now they have this sort of like backing to do this stuff, and the right has you know, realized that they can feel like YouTube, take this video down, and they'll do it. And that's a really terrifying p residents in a lot
of ways. And also it's very you know, I was like, yeah, obviously, because a point of a hypocrisy does nothing. But like, I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of censorship than a member of the government says that something should be taken down and it's taken down.
It's like, it's really so you.
Know, it makes me kind of afraid, honestly, because you know, before I was a victim of a moral panic, and now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare. So you know, what's what's going to happen next? What will we see just made invisible and unseen? And I know that in this country, I have freedom of speech, but that's that's really bullshit. We all know that, Like, I'm not going to reach many people if I stand on a street corner at the park and yell at people.
What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that.
These social media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now by the Republican Party. And what happens when our freedom of reach is annihilated and then suddenly trans people are actually invisible.
We're very close to that. I think Fancy proved that.
Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first step for how you destroy a people.
Yeah.
Art art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak, and I know that's why she came after my art.
There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen. And then like the next tweet is again a sitting member of the US government saying that trans women should be put in men's prisons, and it's like, Okay, one of these is considered violence fight sort of the media machine.
One of them isn't.
Yeah, does she even actually do work for the people of South Carolina? Like I saw, all she does is just like start shit with trans people, like, she says, another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer. And she's just a knockoff product of a bootleg Trump, that's what she is. And she's not even good at her fucking politics.
Like she's tried to get this bathroom band for disallowing trans people to use a bathroom methaiost Capital and her own freaking party kicked the bill out of the out of the bylaws for this year, so she couldn't even get that. And yeah, so I guess she thinks you can get a get a win by harassing me, harassing my art. Yeah, try to get people to come after me.
You know, these people are not as powerful as they want you to believe. Right, A lot of their stuff just fails. But they will only fail if people are willing to resist and people are willing to stop them. And that's the thing that's needed in this moment. Is organization is you know, like is an organization. It is action, it is it is now. It is now the time to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like a should I be organizing a union? Should I
be like setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations? It's like, yeah, it's time, it's time to go because otherwise, you know, and I think this is something that like every trans person now understands intimately, and I think most people don't. Which is that right now it's us, But you know, in two years, assuming we're all still alive, there's a very good chance that it's going to be you like showing up on this show because a fucking
congress person is deliberately interviewed to destroy your life. And I would rather we had stopped this before it got to any of us. But they're going to come for you too unless we stop them. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And where can people find you and find your art? And yeah, support you?
Yeah, thanks for having me. May I really like talking with you. It's been very good and listeneris You can find my work on Spotify. You can also check out my website at precious Child dot com and please sign up for my mailing list there as well. That is the best and best direct way for me to stay in touch with my friends and fans. I'm also Precious Child on Instagram on TikTok. I am the last Precious Child.
I also will be doing live shows this spring and summer in the US, and so follow me on my website and on social media to stay up to date on that and come say him in person.
Hell yeah, we will have thanks to all of that in the description. So yeah, go check it out and resist the creep of fascism.
That's one thing I want to add about I said earlier about personal power and how I have to develop plan personal power by getting to down myself. I want to toil trans people out there, you queer people and your allies. That first thing is getting today's and then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, Fuck these fucking lawmakers. Yeah, good to know each other and strengthen our bonds with each other, because those are bigger than any type of oppressive laws then we put upon us.
And it's only by the strength that we developed with each other, within each other that we will persevere.
Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about it, the Consumer Electronics Show happening here to everyone, And of course it is in fact happening to everyone because over the course of the day, all of our subjects here, all of our experts here, have watched different kinds of dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to replace with a chatbot that was trained on redit it. So I'm going to go around a circle and introduce our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed
Angwaiso Junior. Ed, thank you for being here, Thanks for having me on. We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not gonna say it at the same time because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less. But you're contractually obligated to not mind.
Yes, thank you boss. Great to be here, as always.
Very natural, very natural. Zi hi hi, Hello, Hello, hello, hello, thank you. This is your first cees as well. That's right, your first time being a journalist? Also true. How do you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble, perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes.
I love wearing a dress, shirt and tie and just getting very drunk.
Yeah, you were very surprised when I gave you your gun, but you can't be a journalist without one. Yeah, yeah, I'm playing with it without the safety and last but certainly not least in fact, maybe better than some people in the room. Again, I'm not going to say who. You can wonder that for yourself. Feel in.
Rath.
Thanks, I agree that I'm pretty good. How much better I am than how many people in this room?
I'm not. I'm not even really like something that was not like talking about Yeah, exactly, because we haven't gotten those numbers back from open AI. Yeah, it would be irresponsible to speculate at the mind. Yeah, I got away for three So what I want to do here? I think this is kind of our roll up. We spent our last day on the floor. I want to go around and I'll start first. You guys have a second
to get your thoughts together. What comes to mind immedia is like, this is the thing that I had the most positive reaction to, and this is the thing that I had the most negative reaction to. I think it is a solid way for us to start out, and I think my most negative reaction, obviously was the Amy artificial child best Friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable,
and I hated both that. Like I could tell from an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design, Like it looked like something like oh, Kitt'll think that's cute and from a this is our intent for this product standpoint, it felt like a replacement for the love of adults in the life of a small child, which I thought was like evil in a profound way. And I guess the
best thing that I saw. I'm not perfectly competent at this point to like analyze how well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with Naqi Knakis basically reads facial microemotions in order to let people control the computer, not exclusively, but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. Like, I thought that was really interesting, and it's the kind of thing because honestly, I might loop that in with There was a AI assisted like
Caine for people who were blind. There was another device that led you to control a computer through like facial movements in your mouth. It was like a retainer all the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really people care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world. That's like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a toy ed. You're in the hot seat next.
You know.
The thing I loved the most was obviously the Global Pavilion for connecting Web three businesses.
Across crypto botching.
Oh yeah, DeFi fintech cb DC's, which are central bank digital currencies and legal advocacy. You know, this made my heart flutter because you know what, even when you think they're down, Crypto finds a way to squirm into your life. It really is the zombie of the tech world. Yeah, because it's dead and yet it's undead. It's constantly trying to crawl that.
Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous. Now, yeah, exactly, it's specifically a zombie. I will try to figure out what's the vampire, but specifically Crypto is the zombie.
Yeah.
Yeah. When I first read the line that is not dead, which can eternal lie and with strange eons, even death may die. Yeah, it would.
When I think of, you know, twenty eight years later trailer where they used that poem.
Three six.
You know, like, I'm just guessing where the price of bitcoin is gonna go. I think we're we're at the beginning of a golden age, not for us but for the grifters. Oh God, next week, when are dear Golden Boy gets or Orange Boy gets elected. So I are inaugurated? Has he already won the election?
You did?
Right?
Well, that's that's that's debatable. I think there was some very curious irregularities in days right straightforward from here.
To be encouraging the Blue and one people let him, let him have it, Let him have it. You're right, he wasn't shot at all. That was all an AI trick. Yeah, fifteen would blow your whole head off that way.
You know.
The thing I actually did like the most, similar to you, I really did like the assistive tech. I mean the stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able body either experiencings either cognitive decline or you know, the nerodegenitive things or paralyzed.
Like.
This is actual stuff that we need a lot more investment in development and I assume maybe the scale up production of it and figure out ways that it can be offered to people in a variety or in a spectrum of use cases.
Right.
I think the stuff that I did not like, hmm, you know, I didn't really care for a lot of the luxury surveillance stuff, you know, the fake cgms that you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right next to me, it's a It was a medical device that when I asked, she looks at my attack and goes, no, it's not a medically.
We had a beautiful moment where it was this like it was like a set of smart goggles, which there were a lot of that had like night vision, but also it had like threat assessments. So the specific thing they bragged is like it can help a police officer identify if somebody has a gun. Right, And this this was right after we had gone to an AI security camera that I had flipped off with both hands and it had identified as a man giving the thumbbat And I don't feel great about it identifying the gun.
Luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for a recognition. Also like they had it in litter boxes and shit, don't need that.
I really don't need that.
Why does the letterbox need to be connected to the internet. Why does it need a camera?
You know that does maybe think of a better world where we have exactly as much money and focus on AI, but it's all integrating it into cat focused products like fifty billion dollars being poured into cattle. Translate whatever you're cat is saying into French perfectly. Your cat can make deals with Chinese and by the way, we've hooked him up to venture capital. He has an open line of soft bank. Siri, why you know that?
I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make some deals. Help me figure out why or how he learned to open my door, you know, things like this, But what we get an am bullshit.
I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs be like ladies and gentlemen. We have finally done it. We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat, and I understand there.
Mortalent actually that like common ad where he's talking about AI, but he's like, we taught proofs to a dog.
Got turtleback on what a dog would think about It's just a dog sitting at a table smoking a cigarette. The future. Mm hmm, Garrison, you're up.
Best of CS I think was definitely the VLC media booth at the park where they they had like they had big, big traffic cones on their head, wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks.
They were dressed as wizards.
They were dressed as wizards, and we walked up to them and they said.
Let's let's start VLC folks, if you if you don't know this, this was especially relevant to those of us who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows you to basically play any kind of like any video Fi, idiophile, yes, or audio file, and now it will automatically give you subtitles to using local AI. That's not like reaching to the cloud or anything to do.
It, because putting some titles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard. So they said, we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching, and we will put some titles up for you. We walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything, We have nothing to sell you.
In this beautiful they're fringe. So it was in this like yeah, yeah, wonderful access. I'm not going to the degree of like I don't give a fuck about anything else of this stupid goddamn show that they gave off. They exuded it and.
They're they're they're by far the coolest because of something Robert You said to them.
I walked up and I was like, VLC is a very popular app. They just crossed six billion downloads. I've been using them for almost as long as you've been alive. And I walked up and I was like, I've been using your product for fifteen years. In ordered a pirate media and they said, very nonchalantly, keep going, keep keep going, keep doing that, keep doing that. I'm obsessed.
Yeah, that's amazing.
About this too, because, like I, it's a good app. I have also used it. I saw the guy in the hat and I was like, Oh, it's the VLC from you know, from on your desktop.
And then I was like, that's that's stupid. I don't need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat and a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through. As a journalist pushed aside your instinct to be like, do not approach stranger in a cape?
Garrison does not have that answer.
No, no, At some point the contrary, I feel a magnetic attraction.
This is why I keep an air tag on them. A great way to get abducted.
I think similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids, all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad. We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing that's like kind of like the worst is similar to what you said, ed like the level of surveillance tech. I tried out multiple a systems that are supposed to like detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or gesture and this is really tricky. There was one at
Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company that's powered I believe by Samsung with money and also they've access to like their training data. They're called Visomatic And specifically why this exists. It is a camera that you can put on a put on a computer. It will it will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists
is for online test taking. It's so people don't like look at their phone to like cheat, so it tracks where your eyes are moving and if your eyes look down too much, it's gonna flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously like introduced after the pandemic. There's a lot a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of like online exams that they as a company will put on, you know, whether it's like for people students, employees. But they also
had like other features where you could switch it. I assume what it's doing all the same work, it just is placed differently on the monitor and instead of can you know, do like object detection you know what you're wearing, and the general like behavior analysis if you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also South Korean company for their
own like like surveillance detection. But I asked Visomatic like like, what kind of use cases do you see for this beyond test tick? You know, like yeah, general surveillance, Like yeah, we want to learn how to like predict or like analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by the SK version. One quite funny thing is as I walked by, it first at first identified me as a
blonde war holding a cup. It then changed and said blonde person, which I think is pretty it's pretty deep.
Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook.
Yeah, it could sense the pronouns. It's like hmm, maybe maybe not maybe not a woman, maybe not a blonde person, but but yes, that was you know, something that was like quite well done. Specifically the visomatic stuff like very functional. It could tell when I was looking at the screen, when I was looking at my phone, it could tell from like various various angles, like what I was holding, what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed.
Like it was.
It was very well done. It was very accurate, but you know, possibly scary.
Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast don't know who they are, could be the Washington State Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you boys for your noble service on our nation's roads. I'm not saying that because I got pulled over the other week and I'm really trying to fight a case right now. I would never do that anyway. Thanks guys, and we're back.
Is it my turn?
It is your turn?
Okay, So I'm going to introduce our special white woman CORRESPONDENTSI to give us some exciting breaking news in the white woman tech development world.
Okay, so the first one is positive for contexts, I'm a trans woman. And one of the boosts that was pretty interesting it was this group. Were they French, Garrett, you remember I, I you know they're they're they're European. They're called Ellie Ellie Health.
It's E l I.
Anyways, this is a at home hormone tester, So it is saliva base. It's like a little disposable package. Currently they only advertise cortisol and progress rone, but they have plans for estrade, isle and other hormones, testoster as well, testosterone as well. Sorry, and yeah, so you swab your mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait, what was it, like, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and then you scan this little like QR thing on the device
and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this has very interesting implications for like the DIY hormone market or use case. I started DIY and did my own like blood tests, but a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that.
So this is a it's a good idea if it's actually.
Effective, Like we an't have hands on yet, we haven't tested it yet, but I would love to do a comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying this very interesting, very intriguing.
Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible. Has this compared to the regular like mail in blood tests, which is like the current way to do it, but that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory, and that's maybe not always the best or even like convenient. So being able to test this just at home without shipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really really cool.
Right, There's no insurance involved. This is completely supposedly close source.
From what y'all were telling me earlier today, when you explained this to me, it sounded kind of like the people making this have an understanding of the dangers inherent, particularly to the trans community, and why they might want to use this, and a focus on privacy. For that reason, I didn't press them on that because I don't know. I follow ces you know, wide variety of Yeah.
No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible about kind of what their future plans are, but not specifically like in that level.
But privacy, like they seemed like they had of coursably good understand.
Of course, it's because it's because it is your own like DNA and hormones, you know, Like, I do not know this company is even thinking about trans people if it is trans friendly, but it could be used by trans people regardless.
Yeah, much like a glock exactly exactly.
The potential is great.
And then probably my least favorite goofs.
I have to call out some other white women my so call boho white women is ebjects.
And has that spelled ev ev J E C t okay?
And what this is?
Oh god?
Yes, this is a special plug for your charging port of your EV. So the idea is a nefarious party sees you and your fancy EV and approaches you and you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words, their words, by the way, like they see your fancy car and your targets. So this device will like e jacks, you can just drive away from the charge the power cart.
Leaving broken pieces of plastic both yes, the charger way like this is not reusable, single use, one time use.
Yes.
So yeah, all those all those people targeting so call white women.
This is finally someone is serving the community of people that think that if you find a zip.
Tie on your car door handle MS thirteen. That was the first thing I said. As soon as soon as we walked away, I was like, this product wins the Coolson Media Award for the most white woman product. It's specifically right, like if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted. Way this is this is that exact demographic of people who think they're going to get trafficked in like your local like olive garden parking lots.
Gangs stalked Americans in the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California, where they average incomes like in the eight figures. I gotta say, though, you're being very unfair to them. It was so nice of them to put down the phone where they were doom scrolling TikTok, to look at all of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted.
We're talking about this product. You know, they're like some finally someone's gonna do something about it. Create a disposable piece of plastic.
You notice that guy is always sitting down at the gym and the coffee shop and the gas station.
This is what he doesn't get.
Be careful.
I feel like I could have upsold them, and like what if we put some explosives in this, you know, really like keep them off of the.
Car, like blo, create a diversion inside of it, called the police station and took a picture of him.
And someone scared. A lady driving a Vibe that's one of the electric.
Cars, right, It's like a crocodile tail as as as it whips around, mobilizing anyone in the vicinity.
We're calling it the iguana, and it does with enough force to break a grow man. Yeah, yes, Okay, David Roth.
So there's a lot of I guess I gathered less than in years past that this was at one point like basically a car show. There is not a lot of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to see very much of it, but I did have. I guess this is both my best and my worst experience, the most powerful transit experience of my life.
So I live in New York City. I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go, and you know, it has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good.
It moves like twelve hundred people through a tunnel of thirty odd miles an hour, and for the most part, everybody leaves everybody else alone, or you know, watches videos on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there had to be a better way, and at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it.
You're familiar Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur.
Yeah, so he invented something called the hyper loop which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at eleven miles an hour, and it takes there's someone has to drive it, and also someone has to help you into the car. But you can fit up the three additional people into the car, so that ratio everyone, I know, Yes, right, So yeah, you got two people moving three people two hundred yards
at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades, right, exactly.
I mean, this was the sort of thing. Though there had been tunnels, they were mostly used by animals, voles miners, yes, right, and thought yeah, and that was mostly for pirates in at least one movie I saw recently, Yes, but no one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing.
It was more of a like a place where you would go if you needed to get copper. And of course, but in this case, so this is like where it's good to have and this I guess every ces is like this. This was my first to be reminded that there are visionaries out there who are like, what if you put car through hole? What if instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once. You had a thing that took exactly the same number of people to move a number of people slightly more than Yes, Yeah,
so that was cool. I mean it's just like fun to see like where this stuff is going. And I really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things like cars on the streets of American cities, you know, like it could be okay, David, I mean most of the obviously this is something we'd go on. Last yere was like three or four good things you all said them.
I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here, and there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on. Yeah, up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the you know, like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that nobody whatever your boss can tell if you're really looking
at the zoom that you're on. I don't really love that personally, But for me, the a lot of the smart home stuff is real drag like just in the sense that it clearly, first of all, beyond being like sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make you know human life human life, and just being like I would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day. I'll simply
stand here waiting for that to happen. Yeah, just fucking grim actually, like didn't really care for it. I feel like you gotta like, what are you using that time to do?
Yeah? What are you getting? What are you optimizing from yourself by not having like pieces of like the thing that a human being does, which is like pick your clothes right? Yeah, I wonder how you feel about this because you and I have been going to sees from and I guess a broadly similar number of years. Like I've never been to CEO. Oh really this is your No, I'm a fucking sports writer man, Like, this is a lot of out here because Ed got me a folding head.
I have like the dead eyedes veterans. Oh yeah, well I'm very tired. Yeah.
This is the thing with like I think, as far as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop where you more or less like you start out it's too much, you get big eye right away, and then you just sort of feel zombiefied. But then we have talked to people over the last few days that are like, you know, I remember like fourteen cess ago that was pretty good, like and they're also tired and also arranged by this point.
Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer, I was like, oh man, science has given me everything I want, like, and I guess it's I don't know. Do you remember like when the last one was that you felt like even sort of that stirring. Yeah, twenty like eleven or twelve when they did. I got to see inductive charging of a car for the first time,
and it like was so big. The Las Vegas Convention Center is like as the size of a city, and seeing like the lights in that whole convention center dim as they were doing it was very inefficient because our wild Yeah, but that was just like that was like, oh wow, this is kind of like amazing that this is even possible. But yeah, not really sense, not really sense. That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the hyper loop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be unless something goes wrong,
would it started to seem kind of grim? Otherwise? Well, I the smart home stuff is interesting because that has been as long as I've been going to these they've been trying to sell people on smart homes, and I don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what a smart home is that I think a person would want. I can think of two things a person would want right. One of them is, it would be nice if, like
I didn't have to think about playing music. I could just like tell my house to play the music I wanted, and it would play the music and I could hear it everywhere and I didn't have to fuss with a bunch of shit. And the second is, what if I'm coming home from vacation and my house is cold, it would be nice to turn on the heat or like an hour before I get home. And one of those things you'd use every day, and one of those things it's not really viable to base a business off of.
But like, they keep trying to find new ways to stick computers in my house, and I don't know, does anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking smart home?
No?
I mean, I like, it's not an accident that my apartment is basically going to be in the year two thousand and five forever means it's expensive to do all this stuff. This is the bit thatit with so many of these demos, like just you start to notice how incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as being useful. Is It's like the like Lexus December to remember sales event type energy just a.
Big fuck what lives do you live?
Yeah?
This also we've talked about this on Ed's show that like there's a lot of stuff here that feels like like the first fifteen minutes of a George Romero movie, like just getting you set for Eventually there's going to be a lot of like, you know, disembowelings and hideous shambling zombies. Yeah, and smart home not a bad horror movie concept. I don't think it's a great consumer concept.
Yeah, speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast. All right, we're back, and I want to close this out by asking everybody a question, which is, how do you feel about where tech is going?
I think we're going to hell. I think we are getting wrapped it up very fast into the sweet abyss. I'm worried about the fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance, around precursor forms of prepping, around very soft forms of like perfection and optimization that
rhyme with eugenics. I'm like, I don't like the direction that a lot of this stuff is going, but also there I don't know what to do about it because so much of it is driven by private interest, right, It's like venture capitalists, well capitalized individuals and firms that they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed and these corporations, you.
Know, yeah, the nature of like you can you can really tell that a lot of like the health products are very optimized for like rich tech executives. Like there's a lot of sleep products that are relied on you being willing to like bathe yourself in speakers, playing benaural beats while you slept, and like at different devices measure You're like do an ECG and it's like I don't know, my aunt's not going to do that.
Oh yeah, you know, like I was, you know, I was.
I took with my partner about this.
They have type one diabetes, they have a CGM, they use it constantly, and they're We've been talking about and thinking about writing about how there's been a crop of devices that are like trying to push onto this idea that you need to have close monitoring of it to preempt if you are going to be prediabetic, or to optimize what you're eating throughout the day, but that you know, when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, wow,
you know, if you're sugar slightly goes out, it's because you're being a bad person. It's because you're eating the way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing or character failing there that this tech can help purify you of and you can be your best self, which is really just like not.
Large, you know.
And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a lot of the bi metric surveillance stuff, even though there are applications that are not that.
Yeah, you know, it's kind of focused on like the sin, the health sins that you're committing. We spend a decent amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest, and I do feel like several tech companies were the ones trying to sell us indulgences, right, yeah, yeah, all right gear.
There's small improvements for consumer tech.
Right.
This is a very consumer based where it's supposed to be a consumer based tech show. There's products like the Shocks headphones, which every year get a little bit better. I try to bone conducting headphones last year, which are very good. They work underwater.
If you're deaf in an ear you can listen to your music the way you used to be able to.
Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works, but it does work. I can hear it if you're standing like two three feet away. There's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle of my head despite having to not put an earbud actually like in my ear. They're super useful, work, great, really good sound quality, durable.
I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day, like sweat rain. Great products.
It's like small improvements, right, It's not it's not necessarily like revolutionizing hearing, but it's it's very very small improvements. Where as the other kind of big, big trend, which isn't necessarily like holly consumer based. It's kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards is I feel like they're trying to replace friendship with this form of like technology and like AI enable technology. You used
to have friends to get recommended new music. You used to have like friends to like tell you about new stuff that they're interested in. No longer. Now you have an AI agent that can do that for you. You you don't need you don't need friends to help kind of talk about, you know, you had a rough breakup. Instead, you can have a short term replacement. Using AI, you
could have a friend replacement of a girlfriend replacement. It's all these things are trying to replace the core concept of friendship, even as like as even as like a baby, even as a toddler. Your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside. It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize your fridge, tell you what to tell you what. We'll roll around your house in the middle of the night with cameras, and that could be your first friend.
It's replacing the core concept of friendship. It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life. Because as smooth as possible, that completely ignores like what it means to be human.
It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot elie Q, which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to help people, and what I usually see with AI, which is trying to design a device to remove the need for human empathy. Like I went to a there was a vet app called Laika that's like chat GPT for veterinarians, and they were like, yeah, you know what, most of it we focused initially on like technical questions, so like if I
have these symptoms, what can that mean? But that's asking us is like we would really like advice on how to talk to people that their pets are going to die? And I was like, do you are Vett's not getting out of that school, because that's like that's a big part of being an a vet, Like do they need chet GPT for this?
I saw this other company that was like it was designed to help you get over the loss of your pet, where you could you could pump tons of photos of your pet into this AI into this AI generator and it will generate new images and this is proven to help you move on from loss, which is literally a Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago, seven years ago, and like, no, you should talk with your friends about that. That's why you are a human. That's how you can
move on from loss. You have to make new connections. Poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to help you move on, Like what why? Anyway, Replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do, maybe because they don't understand real human relationships that aren't like innately transactional. I'm not sure, but that is like a huge trend that I've seen multiple multiple people mention.
All right, Zi, So I've worked in this industry for like three years now and this is my first big convention, and I would say, uh, this is just affirmed pretty much all of my disillusions with the tech world, and most of it's just nonsense. And maybe the postive people are onto some stuff.
Well you say that, but I really do think via dox is kind of revolutionize the way in which mysterious fogs kill large numbers of the Maybe, but don't name it something so sinister. Yeah, yeah, it's if you were to be like this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time. That would be great. I would just don't call it apple fresh, yes, but call it apple fresh.
By the way, you should listen to You should listen to Better Offline to hear context for veradox, which we discussed in the last episode of our daily Cees coverage over there with the wonderful Edixitron. But essentially baradox is this missed. They get sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps it stay shelf stable for a few more days.
Exactly. So maybe that shelf stable mist will also translate to waking.
Up the dead possibly, But you don't know that it's gonna do You don't know that it's not going to do that, right right.
As a journalist, that's sorry, you have to ask these questions.
And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline.
Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring red leaf led us back to life does have any repercussions in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead loved ones.
David, it's me sorry. A lot of good points.
I mean, I think garyin ever both made the point about the sort of sociopathic like thread of a lot of this just sort of like an inability to understand not just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to fuel not I mean, they're probably our people.
I imagine that. It's like if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards. You know, he's like Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson. We love Brian's.
Yeah, but he like I feel like he would have been walking through this clapping his hands with delight.
A day, drinking his son's blood time for Yeah, it's a.
It's I drink his son's blood pretty rights and it's not bad.
The high quality plot, but that it felt like it was that that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization onto like transcending being human at all. And I don't think I mean again, there probably are people that want that. They certainly have money. I don't imagine that. I think what most people would like. I mean, then you don't expect technology to make you feel more human. But something I've been thinking.
About a lot. We're talking about this a lot on Better.
Offline, But there's a passivity that a lot of this sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're just like sort of are happening to you that make your life more efficient and convenient.
And I don't think that I want that.
I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the you know market that I think they're aiming for with this, But it's certainly old enough to remember, as you said, like finding music, like that's a thing that yeah, you know,
your friends tell you about it. And in my case, I mean again just being in my middle age, you like go to a store and you flip through shit, like there's a distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed to something like you're a foa grag goose and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being.
And I think it's an important distinction. I think that little bit of.
Agency of having some sense of doing the things that you want to do, like I would imagine that, well, I don't have to imagine it technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you.
I think that.
I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking matrix pod and I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the.
Matrix pod dwelling community. I think that's that's about the best line we could go out on, like, that's that's yeah, you nailed it.
Thanks.
I thought I crushed that one. Yeah you did. You did, great job, Dave. Where can people find your workday defector dot com? Why let me do that without crushing my water? No, no, no, no, that's okay.
Let me.
That's a load bearing piece of content. Defector dot com is the website and at.
Big black Jack a bit on Twitter and Blue Sky. This Machine Kills is my podcast. Tech Bubble dot Soapstack dot com is the newsletter.
Hell yeah, do you want to tell people how to find you?
Zi hat new old woman on Twitter with okay zeros.
Zeros for neo.
Zeros, All right, everybody, Well, uh, that's going to do it for us here at It could happen here and are week at cees. You know, just try to hub hug your loved ones until the Viera ox sweeps through all of their homes neighborhoods. Yeah, it's in the room, It's in the room.
Welcome to ninkadappan here a podcast about things falling apart, how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Long Return for the holidays, Returned, rejuvenated, returned, refreshed, Return to do something a little bit different.
In the coming weeks.
We're going to be doing a lot of nitty gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism.
But what we haven't really been doing as much.
What I want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism atic sort of macro level and what it looks like right now, and also talk about an extremely cooked guy.
Who blew himself up in a cyb outside of Trump Building, and with me to talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so many different things that like, I don't know someone's going to write a great biography in like one hundred years.
It is.
It is the one and only Vicky Oshtawhile.
Thank you.
Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before you're you find people could hear me.
Oh, I'm glad to have you here.
And part part of this the initial thing that was like, okay, we need to do this was I saw you called all of this the years of lead paint, and that is just it has stuck in my mind every for every single second of every day since then.
Yeah, yeah, I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for CA Go chext us out, but I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of you know, that sort of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Hotel. Then about you know, as we were about to talk about Matthew Livelsburger, I think is how
it's pronounced, who's the green beret? Then big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but like the purging of democratic politicians.
Is that what we think his yeah, version was, Now that seems to be it like politicians, and like it's kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep state thing where he wants democrats gone from like the army and right right, you know, so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rope from the Turner Diaries is kind of like metastasized into all this right wing culture where they have their own sort of like
less race worry or like less anti Semitic versions of it. Yes, and that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by exactly blowing himself up with a.
Truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.
So basically, this guy that the spaping a Green Beret, which, like say what you will, arguably some of the most trained and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever else you say about and this is important.
You know, I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like green Beret to like former Green Beret.
This guy was active duty, so like right, yes, yes, yes, exactly. This wasn't even like a cooked vet.
This is a guy who is like in the shit and we know that he was drinking the kool aid because he used chat GPT.
He've just turned out today to help plan his attack.
But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise which undeniable, cyber truck, like all Tesla's, is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans, And what I really mean, of course,
is that they have terrible safety protocols. And the cyber truck, which is like a twelve year old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly incredibly firm, stainless steel body which does not crumple and does not take damage, which means that your frail human body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal, very
dangerous to be inside. But the car doesn't take damage, and that means that if you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the car were fine, so the explosion went straight up right, so it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a.
Little damage at the hotel.
Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say, you know this guy who's like an active duty green beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an elon musk car will somehow lead to the murder of Democrats. But he's so tech pilled that he takes a cyber truck, which doesn't even work as a bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like
horrible image. And I mean, you know, I'm being flippant about this, Like it's awful thing obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was everywhere on social media for like the last three days of that of that cyber truck on fire outside of the Trump towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of life. So I wrote an essay around that basically.
Yeah, So I want to start talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are, because I imagine it's some of you, like there's probably, like I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and like know the name of every single guy he was implicated for these car bombings, but for everyone else who's normal. And I caught myself among the non normal people because I did. I spent about two years going down the
years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But the years of lead were this thing in roughly the seventies and the eighties, in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the sixties, and like the giant uprising is ninety sixty eight.
And Italy's kind of different from the rest of Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example, France has this huge up rising in May sixty eight, like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils have seized control of the factories, like they lose this our bottle, Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing at a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind of never seriously threatened the French government. Again in Italy, that is not true.
Like sixty eight.
In Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but like the seizure of the factories has been going on since Like I mean, stuff like this has been happening since the fifties, and it really only stops in nineteen seventy seven when like they have one last big push
uprising and it fails. So as a way to contain this, the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left wing terror groups and by terror groups I mean, like the most famous thing in this is called the Bolognia train bombing in nineteen eighty. It kills eighty five people, wounds like two hundred and ninety. Like it's a really really horrific attack, and it's immediately blamed that an anarchist group. It turns
out it's not an anarchist group. It is a state back like fascist group. And yeah, like there are other ones I will pass over to VICTI you talk about, like the other terrible shit that they did.
Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends the years of lad you could end it there.
It's sort of the last big terrorist month.
The first thing, the event that like sort of after sixty eight kind of starts at as this thing called the Piazza Fontana bonding in Milan, which is like an
agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just like but seventeen people are killed, almost one hundred people are wounded, and the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in sixty eight as well, And there's a famous there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pinelli who is arrested and then while he is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the police department to his death.
Yep.
It has still never been proven that he was pushed. The police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him really hard.
Yeah.
Sure.
Oh Like here's a very famous Italian play about it by Dario Foe called the Death of an Anarchist. So anyways, they blame the anarchists, They literally murder a leading anarchist printer and organizer, and then of course it turns out that it was this terrorist group called ordinay Nuovo, who was, you know, this neo fascist group that had let's say
significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I think like one way of understanding the years of Lead, I think that might be easy forople who aren't familiar with it, is that it's it's like a very low level civil war. It's it's I think the closest thing we can maybe think of as the troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeah, and the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas
like the you know, the movement was in Ireland. But this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings, both on the right and the left that are like both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks.
Yeah, and there's I mean, there's other stuff too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here. I have explained this on the show at some point.
I think it's in.
I think it's in if you go to the Hall of Weed episode we did where we talk about conspiracies.
I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right, the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay behind networks, so it's designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like and having all these bombings was specifically something they call the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to drive people back towards the state. Because the idea was
and this and this seems to have worked. You know, you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know, there's bombs going off all the time, people are getting killed, people are getting kidnapped, There's all of this just like horror happening, and the goal is to get people to turn to the state for you know, sort of order insecurity and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need you know, we need to sort of terror to end.
And it was.
Extremely effective, and the sort of knowledge of this has I guess proliferated through the American left in the last like decade, and that has led to a lot of I think kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is Gladio is those those state behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo fascist groups, and like to refer to this sort of like I don't like what's happening in the US,
and that's not really what's happening. And this is where I want to pass it to VICKI to talk about sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the Years of Lead Paint and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones.
Yeah, in classic American fashion. Everything is more chaotic and autonomous, yes, and widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America products and services.
Did I do again?
Let's support this podcast. That's a good one. We are back, all right, Years of Blood Paint. Let's go.
Yes, Right, So I actually think, you know, as you were saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio And it's not Gladio, because that was very conscious and it was like these stay behind networks are organized explicitly but the US state defense of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle availability and making the US the sort of home for military surplus because obviously, like the military industrial complex sells lots
of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing a reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort of Years of Lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension way, I think might actually be close. But you can tell that that's very disorganized. Yeah, it's very distributed through the social it's done by you know, volunteers, right.
Yeah.
And also the people who are doing the Years of Lead are unbelievably cynical about it right, Like they don't they don't believe any of this shit, right, yes, yes, no exactly, we're the Second Amendment guys. Like that stuff is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme
like increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what they were trying to do, but that's sort of you know, that's the effect of a lot of this stuff.
Yeah, it wasn't.
It wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's just like a similar thing, the years of lead paint, which is obviously like which is a joke about. There's this big reactionary myth from like the freakonomics guys. I think that like the rise in crimes like correlated to like the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms, which is.
Really funny because for the freakonomics guy that that is a down right left wing theory standard.
Yeah exactly, or maybe it was a dude directing it.
I don't even remember now anyway, So it became it became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers and generation acts people you know, having the bled paint in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff. Obviously I'm not advocating that kind of like ablest insult when I talk about this, and is a memetic way of making fun of that concept.
But all of that to say, they.
Have completely drunk the kool aid, right, the fascists, as you're saying, Yah, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They were like making
it up. But like a lot of people on the right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy, excuse me, in Italy in the sixties and in the actual years of lead, years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing that January was Antifah, like people whose friends were there, you know, yeah, like stuff like Q and the other thing that the reason that this is years of lead pain and not the first Trump administration is because during
the first Trump administration there was actually pretty pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements and they could they could certainly come back in the US right now.
There's no reason they couldn't.
Yeah, And it's also worth talking about we'll be covering this on the show, like at some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents. But there was recently a massive from distributed to Nile Secrets, a massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from a guy who infiltrated it. It's a very good Republic of story talking about the guy that will link in
the show notes. So, like, the militia movement has survived, but the kind of stuff that like we saw in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty.
Like is not.
Yeah, the Proud Boys Q and on, the folks who made up J six and the folks who made up the alt right, you know, broadly were largely defeated by anti fascists in the street. And then the people who remained QAnon folks who were I think, you know, some of those people were pretty hardcore neo Nazis obviously, but a lot of those folks were confused Internet boomers, right, and like those people mostly got discouraged by the repression.
The repression I think successfully sort of put the ends to that organized Q stuff.
Yeah.
Well, and also, and I also have talked about on this show The other thing they put an end to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you could use the literally the exact same structure of Q and on, but they make it about trans people. Yes, and that has been unbelievably effective.
Now the strategy as a media strategy has continued, but as an on the ground organizing principle, it's not that functional.
Yeah, it's not, which is very lucky. But what that means is that Trump has come to.
Power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Like that was a real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His rallies this election. People left early. You know, it was like it was like going to see a losing team and their last home game of the season. You know, was the vibe at those rallies.
Yeah, to do a very specific example, it's like the vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics before they were fucking run out to be for their owner move in the last bag exactly where like they've had an incredibly disappointing season, like deliberately by the owner who decided to make who made a bad team? So people wouldn't fight him, like moving the team to La like it's like that kind of.
Hyeah, those are the vibes. And yet of course the Democrats, in their infinite infinite capacities, lost the election. And so what that means, though, is that is that you have this moment where actually the right has as much power in the federal government as it's ever had. You know, the resistance is you know, they you know, they're very proud of legally handing power to the man and ending all of his charges or whatever.
But the street movement is disorganized.
So you have this gap between the two where there's this really powerful media apparatus Fox News, Truth, Social X, the Everything app you know, all of these like all these places where the fascists you know, and I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today.
I mean, you know when we're recording this. So it's just there's this.
Huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organization. You get people like this Green beret who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which would be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump Hotel up in an attempt to start the race
war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right, the imagination of as you said, the Turner Diaries or this sort of like you know, the right wing terror networks in the US. You know, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grits.
Right, they think of the cause enough chaos, like.
You will return everything to the hobbsy and world of all against all, and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart. Whatever it's you know, it's step one, kill my family, step two, question mark question marks, step three, white supremacist revolution.
It's horrifying. I mean, it's horrifying, horrifying idea, But.
That's happening in these groups that have really really they believe I think genuinely that, Like I think the right does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asana Shakur, Like they see them both as equally dangerous.
Right.
They hate Liz Cheney.
Yeah, Like in the final days of elections, she was the person they were saying we're gonna go after her, like Liz Cheney like.
Really like yeah, it's like like the closest parallel could think of this as like there was a faction of people between the Cold War who thought that like the Sino Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked, and like there were literally guys murdering each other, like Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other like on the border like in sixty nine, right, like and there were people who were convinced for the entire
Cold War, even as like as China is invading Vietnam, are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy and that like and that's the secretly like the USSR and the PUERC are working together, and these are not like you know, some random guys that's like, these are these are like the guys that like like the peak of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And this is I think, yeah, like this this is the kind of thing we're in now. Just like these
people are completely cooked. They don't they don't have any analytical building whatsoever. They just they actually have drunk their own kool aid.
There was just a scoop. Sorr jop is really quick.
There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of products Many day five.
Their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.
They want to take down Wikipedia, like because because that's a place you can verify facts at right, They've already got the Post, They've got the Times, Like, what are they gonna do? They gotta GoF to Wikipedia. This is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build.
Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world of unreality and that attempts to sell it to you?
Ooh, prox and services. That's a fourth this podcast.
Yes we are back. I'm very proud of that one. That that's one of the best ones I've ever done. And I just completely off the top of my head, just came back better than ever.
She's never been so bad.
So I want to move a little bit from the just what does the state look like? How pilleda these people kind of thing to I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here because I think part of what's happening here and it's become kind of unfashionable in academic to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act
and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going on here, a good place to go is like going back to here David Graver, and he has this line talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote it. I think it might be from the
Shock of Victory. But he has this line about how neoliberalism, when given a choice between making their system actually work and making it seem like alternative and neoliberalism is impossible, it will always choose making me alternatives seem impossible, because that's what neoliberalism is, right. This is, you know, the sort of maxim of Margaret Thatchery is the reason of alternative.
It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the you know, and this includes the possibility of a future and the goal of this And this is I think that the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah, this is some thing thicky I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.
Yeah, yeah, I was sort of vibing with what you're saying.
But yeah, I think a lot of people online have accepted sort of you know, don't give in an advance, right. But like, I think one big thing that has been part of the Biden like strategy of counter revolution and part of what's been going on over the last four years, but indeed over the last four decades as well as sort of part of neoliberalism, is like the idea that
you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to make a choice, right, and any choice made otherwise, you know, is doomed to failure.
Right.
And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone
except my gut. I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous thirty years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews and then you do a political change that moves things like twelve percent one way, you know, nudge politics as like Barack Obama loved or whatever.
Right, So that's sort of like there's there's that sense. But then on the individual sense, it's.
Also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity, right, because part of what the sixties was and the reason the sixties lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had the like the last in Western Europe. They had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, like coming up from Sicily. So they had this like massive, massive factories
that had these like crazy strikes over over again. So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neoliberalism and blah blah blah, breaking down labor workforce. Like, we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right, and like we go to the HR department to get help, right.
Where we sort of get self care. We like work on ourselves.
We get therapy, you know that our boss offers us you know, thoughts and prayers right when when things are hard. But like there's a big attempt to allow people to define themselves sort of the carrot. The carrot of the sixties was like, you know, you get to like have an identity, like, Okay, we won't be officially racist.
Yeah, quote unquote, you know, okay, we won't be officially sexist.
And they claim, okay, whatever, none of that's true, but they but they sort of sell that, and then they say, but in return, you have to like do all of the self work.
You have to be an identity in the marketplace.
So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces, right, like yeah, and so that in you know, spoony world becalled that sort of choice paralysis, right, And I think that's probably accepted as well, that like you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless on the face
of it. You can't do anything, and so that produces a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right, That's another thing people want is like.
Someone else decide for me. I'm sick of thinking about this.
Yeah, And that's I think been one of the most important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for someone else to make choices for you, to free you from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy and shit.
Like that and oh my god, you know, and the right has a bunch of alternatives here right with like this is the fantasy of what treadwives is. It's like what if someone else did your thinking for you.
It's also the entire logic behind AI right and betwinding, this sort of AI agent's thing that they're like pushing right now, go listen towards see ES coverage and you'll care much about it.
Is like what if someone just like planned your life for you?
Right?
What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat, and we would tell you how to live.
And this is you know, this is also the structure of how cults work.
Like this is why colts have been able to.
Attract people that, like, I think the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them, as why there so many engineers in cults because there's like a once of people who have to make choices constantly, and the cult is like, hey, what if I just like made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little bit before.
This is ultimately part of what's going on with like trump Ism, right, because Trump is also to some extent, like if you're in this movement, like you no longer have to choose anymore.
You just you know, here is the guy. The guy is going to do the thing for you.
This is also if you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right, it's about the sort of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual, and the single heroic individual like acts outside of the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and
like does all this stuff for you. And I think there's a compa of that with this sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety also, and this is something that is very well documented that you know, we're are going to get into a foll here. But all of the stuff we've been talking about about the information space, where there's this constant deluge of just nonsense.
And that's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you that something is true, but to convince you that it's impossible to figure out what is happening and to make you just give up. And when you're refusing to make a choice between like was there a gas attack in Syria or was it like staged by the rebels as the fallse flag, right, you're refusing to make the choice, has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you from sort of the field of play of action.
And this has been a really important part of this to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi gabberd Gabit was right, was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them. And you know, now, Tulsi Gabbert is like one of the big people in Trump world, right, I think, what's his name? I disrespect him by not
remembering his name, but I should. For the podcast, Steve Bannon put it well when he said, just flood the zone with shit, right, it's sort of the strategy. You just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter. And this is how Trump also like kept ahead of his you know, many scandals, as he would just like say, the next most outrageous thing, and you know, you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already
at the next thing. And it was just a sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it, you get exhausted, And I think, you know, you mentioned healthcare markets, and I think, like that's really that's really telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.
We're in the midst of a pandemic. Covids is in another wave that like no one has named right now, and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic during the election of twenty twenty four. Yeah, So part of what's been going on too is that there has been this mass push by the Biden administration of the Democrats to make us forget what happened in twenty twenty in terms of the uprising YEA, and then make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which continuing
to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy. Right, it was already pretty bad for it, and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone had to be forced back to work.
How do you force people back to work who evidently care about each other and their own safety. You lied them, You confuse them about what's actually going on. Right, So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats, and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had to go back to work, so we had to get
over the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know whatever.
Yeah.
But on the other hand, the strategy of the Years of Lead was a strategy born of strength, right, the years of Lead paint This is not a strategy built by people who haven't credibly solid grasp on power.
Right.
The actual base that put Trump in power, right, and their actual political base is incredibly brittle. Right, they are about to tank the entire global economy like through by by putting like fifty percent taria of some like every single country in the world. They okay, let's let's be accurate here. That on on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods, which is like, okay, like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you, as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the US imports things from.
Right, So, like, you know, this is how you resist. This is this how you resist.
Here you're learned helplessness is by going and research and things for yourself. But you know they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought into power was fury at rising prices. Right, these fucking arrogant bastards have sown the winds and they are going to reap
the fucking whirlwinds. The basis of this fucking of this entire strategy, you know, and I ask you this, like, dear listener, do you think these people can hold three hundred and thirty million people in line by sheer force?
No, of course not.
There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population that has ever existed in human history.
Right.
This strategy is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance. Yes, And if they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation.
Right.
They need you scared, They need you confused, They need you completely convinced of your own helplessness. They need you to forget that, as the old song says, in your hands is placed to power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified one thousandfold. They need you to forget the next line of the song, which goes, we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old when the union makes
us strong. And this is the entire fucking thing, right, If these people were actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization.
Yeah, exactly.
And the thing is right.
The thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, that means that you just literally any random person can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing. The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what, it's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you know how to do for you, to use the relationships in people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things.
And they are fucking terrified of this. Yes, their entire strategies to make sure that you simply do not do this. And every single one of you has the power to do this. And I know this because I also was just some random dipshit Like I was just literally a random college student, right, Like, I was just some asshole, and I just started doing things right. And I got together with my friends and we fucking we made a tendance union and we did anti I stuff, and we
did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you. We just you know, decided one day we were going to do it. And it happens to return one last time to David Graeber. One of one of his most famous quotes is theultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you making this world differently, and together we can do that.
Yes, that's exactly right.
And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices they become so much less important. And actually, when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together, that you're building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices as to make decisions, yeah, because you would know what you need for the next step,
or you'll have an idea of it. You might make a mistake, you might be wrong, but each step along that way, like, it's an easier way to do this and to feel the power of real choices rather than the false choices of like do you want your AI from grock or do you want it from CHATGBT, Right, And obviously like that's a joke, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore. They they have decided, they have decided that what we get is stomped We
get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us. Is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very very quickly and reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really
hard to preserve the niceties of the government. Is because they have a slightly fresher memory of the French Revolution and the guillotines which haunts them, or the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the French. Yeah, when the slaves rose up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Heiti and it has been punished ever since.
The point being that.
These things that they are overwhelming. This flooding the zone was shit, as Mia says, is from a position of weakness because when they were strong, when they were strong, they had Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country, and he can just go on hope and he can actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular, like even through a huge economic collapse. Right, that was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of
real senescence. That I use the phrase advisably. And there are a lot of holes.
And they have drunk the kool aid. The right has drunk the kool aid.
They don't know the difference between democrats and anarchists, not really, they genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do, their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference. That gives us a lot of space to move, That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them, and that might be invisible to social media,
which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness. In many ways, the strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways, I think, than they were in previous times, and they're going to have to be of necessity because maga is basically, you know, it's the eye of sore on and if it lands on you like, you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can just kind of move, and if you don't, you know, run into any any trouble like, you can get a
lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that. But there's a lot to do, and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community. And if enough people start doing that, then they will take away all their power.
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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